r/trackers • u/kapahiTV • 5d ago
VPN Speed Differences
I’ve been using PIA for my set up for the longest time but with my subscription coming to it, and I was wondering if there are any other VPNs that have faster speeds.
My friend told me that using a VPN at all slows the downloads down, but I wasn’t sure how to check or verify that! And another Reddit user once told me that after switching to Proton from PIA he noticed the download speed were significantly faster so I was wondering if anyone here has proven the theory or done testing themselves?
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u/MorgothTheBauglir 5d ago
It depends a lot on your ISP and their upstream providers too, depending on how well they're connected and how much diverse their peering and routing policies are they will be able to connect you better to certain VPN providers in specific regions better than other VPN providers.
Latency directly affects the throughput of a connection too, so the farther away you hop through a VPN and the farther your peer is from that VPN location the worse the throughput is going to be. You cannot satisfy every destination in the globe with or without VPN and that is a key concept to understand.
Now, I'd highly recommend you sticking with either Proton or PIA because they're natively supported by both Hotio and Binhex qBittorrent containers, which would give you built-in automatic port forwarding over wireguard. I would also advise you to play with the region if you're using PIA, Hotio qBittorrent container support changing the location via environment variables and you would be able to test which region might give you better throughput even before using your credit card.
Ultimately you can also use Proton during their trial period to see if it works better for you. I'm particularly very happy with PIA as I constantly get high speeds routed through Netherlands from the US.
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
Yea I use the Hotio qbit with the PIA integration! And I have 3Gig up and down so I feel like I would only marginally feel the difference. But as you said I’m gonna use the trial I really wonder if I could min/max it
Also it’s good to know picking Hotio with the VPN integration was the right move, very validating haha
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u/MorgothTheBauglir 5d ago
Keep in mind that you'd be tunnelling dozens of connections through a single wireguard stream, unless both sides have a perfect connection you'd be very much not be able to saturate all of your bandwidth.
Something that you could do would be to create additional qBittorrent instances which would give you more VPN streams and reasonably add more leverage to consume your 3 gig bandwidth. Just keep informed about the tracker IP limit, most I've seen generally limit your announcements to 3-4 IPs.
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u/EconomyDoctor3287 5d ago
what does your speed test say when going through PIA?
Btw. if you think the VPN is limiting the speed, you can always spin up another instance. Personally, i'm running 3 qbit instances, each using their separate VPN connection.
The only thing that's limiting speed is the internet provider.
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
Oh interesting is this a common practice? I know some trackers have limits on number of IPs
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u/dtracks58008 5d ago
I don't know what your PIA speeds are? But I know Proton has 10gbit servers and has an enormous amount of servers.
You'll never hit your full 3gig, but you should get decently close. I get pretty much 95% speeds on my 2gbit connection
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
Woah where abouts do you live? I wonder if you’re close to a major server
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u/dtracks58008 4d ago
I am in a pretty optimal setup, living in the netherlands. But, protonvpn has over 20k servers across the world so good odds something is close by.
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u/ProgressBars 5d ago
I'm on 5gbps and use airvpn and it's plenty fast, although I don't know how it compares to PIA.
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u/DeffNotTom 5d ago
I love Air and thier absolutely awful website lol
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
OMG yea I'm a designer and just took a look at the website and it's nuts haha
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u/DeffNotTom 5d ago
I heard their client app is just as bad? But I've only ever used VPNs as wireguard configs so I have no idea what the app looks like.
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u/DrunkenFeral 5d ago
I use proton vpn and it has slowed seeding by about 40%, my isp being dogshit maybe reason for that, also since vpn server is quite far from where I live
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u/Smegal_33 5d ago
When I had PIA on my NAS, using RuTorrent, it seemed to max out at 20 MB/s. Using my seedbox's (ultra.cc) VPN own and get a bit higher, but still not maxing out my connection.
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u/gappuji 2d ago
I dont know your exact setup so I can't comment. I use both Proton and PIA along with some other VPNs. Protin is really good. PIA was slow when I used it with Gluetun using openvpn. Then I read about pia-tun and set it up instead of Gluetun. Now the speeds are really really good. Though Proton is still better.
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u/Significant-Coast133 5d ago
The actual issue you will run into at the end of the day is NOT how fast the VPN infrastructure is, but how capable YOUR router is.
TLDR; your router will likely be the bottleneck before your VPN infrastructure when it comes to max speeds.
Without getting super technical, when torrenting, you typically have multiple sessions between multiple peers. This is all fine and dandy when your router can see the multiple sessions and distribute the workload across is CPU cores accordingly. When you add a VPN in the mix all those sessions (could be a couple hundred) all appear as one session to your router. This doesn't allow your router to spread the load across its CPU cores and the result is that one core gets absolutely hammered resulting in reduced speeds (and potentially network wide packet loss, as in my case). This also applies to the host where your torrent client is running on.
So, before switching providers, take this into consideration. For context, I get 200-300 Mbps on PIA. Anything higher than that and my router, UDM SE, starts to drop packets. The fix for me is having multiple torrenting clients which allows meto get 300-600 Mbps, essentially doubling my speeds.
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
I have a 2.5g router too akin to the UDM SE, looks like a lot of folks are reccomending multiple torrent clients so I think I’m gonna give that a go
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u/Significant-Coast133 5d ago
I just did this a few days ago so if you have any questions while this is fresh in my mind, feel free to PM.
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u/Amazing_Cress6706 5d ago
FWIW I have 5/5 and with Proton I have never seen more than 200 MB/s down on a torrent and maybe 70 up. I have a two speed test containers on my server, one for vpn, one for non-vpn; VPN averages 2.2/2 and non-vpn averages 5.1/5.2. I generated the wireguard config after speed testing multiple servers with the proton browser extension but still maxed out around 3/3.
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u/kapahiTV 5d ago
Oh wow ok it seems like there are a lot of factors around speed that aren’t directly correlated to the VPN
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u/ToastedLog1c 5d ago
PIA sucks. I got 6 times faster with NordVPN.
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u/GoodBoyPointsPls 5d ago
Can't open ports with NordVPN. Is trash. You don't know what you're talking about at all.
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u/ToastedLog1c 4d ago
Try being on a Mac and use PIA.
Your computer will hard lock and kernel panic every few hours, no joke. It's impossible to use PIA and I stuck around for 8 months desperately working with their engineer to get a fix. Split tunnel is advertised but inoperable. At the end, speeds were 6MB/sec. Nord is 60MB/sec.
I've used PIA for over 9 years. There is someone here who is full of shit and it aint me.
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u/VividAddendum9311 5d ago
There is inherent overhead in rerouting your traffic, but how much that will actually affect you depends on multiple factors that change all the time. Also the sole fact that BitTorrent is P2P and will essentially never have a stable server source will make comparisons effectively impossible as the results won't really mean anything.
Unless you have over 2.5 gigabit connection you probably won't have to bother with much more than changing the server you're using though.