PIA Leads To Slow Upload Speeds
This seems to be a pretty common issue, but none of the fixes that I have read about have worked for me. When not connected to PIA, torrenting works perfectly fine. Once connected to PIA, everything still works fine EXCEPT that my uploading speed is far too small.
As the image above indicates, my torrent IP address matches my public IP address while connected to the PIA server. Yet the orange triangle in the status bar indicates what seems to be a port issue. Strangely, the orange status occasionally becomes the green check mark or the red X, without any apparent reason. Still, it is orange most of the time.
The uTorrent bandwidth test is always fine, but the network test always results in the orange checkmark as shown above, indicating that the port is not open. I have verified using the Port Forward Network Utility that, when PIA is connected, the port is unavailable. When I disconnect from PIA, the same utility reports that the port is available.
Here are my PIA settings:
Here are my uTorrent settings:
I have even tried manually forwarding ports using my router software (though I have read that this should not be necessary as my router has UPNP enabled):
I am running Windows 8.1, the latest version of uTorrent, the latest version of PIA, and my ISP is Comcast. I have historically had a consistently reliable and speedy internet connection with good upload/download speeds using uTorrent. I recently started using PIA, and it is only when connected via this VPN that the port/upload issue arises. There must be something simple that I am not understanding, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
As the image above indicates, my torrent IP address matches my public IP address while connected to the PIA server. Yet the orange triangle in the status bar indicates what seems to be a port issue. Strangely, the orange status occasionally becomes the green check mark or the red X, without any apparent reason. Still, it is orange most of the time.
The uTorrent bandwidth test is always fine, but the network test always results in the orange checkmark as shown above, indicating that the port is not open. I have verified using the Port Forward Network Utility that, when PIA is connected, the port is unavailable. When I disconnect from PIA, the same utility reports that the port is available.
Here are my PIA settings:
Here are my uTorrent settings:
I have even tried manually forwarding ports using my router software (though I have read that this should not be necessary as my router has UPNP enabled):
I am running Windows 8.1, the latest version of uTorrent, the latest version of PIA, and my ISP is Comcast. I have historically had a consistently reliable and speedy internet connection with good upload/download speeds using uTorrent. I recently started using PIA, and it is only when connected via this VPN that the port/upload issue arises. There must be something simple that I am not understanding, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Comments
Under the proxy, I see that you have the details in there, but the type is set to none. That may as well say disabled. Set it to Socks5
Finally, you have it setup to use a maximum of 800 connections. That is way too high. Bad peers will grab hold of them and throttle you because you have too many. (Particularly for a VPN.) I would lower the global maximum to no more than 100 and the per-torrent maximum to around 20 or so. If you want more, increase it slowly. (Add a few at a time or so.) And give it time for your changes to propagate before you think it is working fine. (Let the tracker time reset for all trackers twice before you think the changes are showing.)
I am actually not a torrent user, so I apologize if any of my terminology is wrong. I hope this helps.
You do realize that the single port used for forwarding is randomly assigned by PIA
And while it generally doesn't change, it can change.
The set up process you are describing sounds like you are assuming you get to pick which port is used for forwarding and that this port won't change ever.
Setting the port in your router just opens your router to that port, but does not tell PIA which port it should assign to you.
So all those settings might be just fine, if the slow down is because you have a different port for forwarding.
I don't use utorrent but I've used a few other clients for years, and the overall config schemes are the same, just with different jargon mixed in.
upnp BAD, unless you know what you're doing, or actually use it a lot, then it's not terribly secure net-wise, but up to you
connections: *shrug* never mess with it that much, so can't say, if the setting worked without the VPN you generally shouldn't need to change it.
As long as you are using the PIA client, for proxy settings you should leave it set to none.
UNLESS you actually have proxy you want to use on top of the PIA VPN connection.
OmniNegro: I did previously have the proxy setting set to Socks5, thereby activating all the proxy settings, but it did not solve the problem. Also, you may be right about the current setup allowing too many connections (and I will experiment with this in the future), however, since everything starts working fine as soon as I disconnect from PIA, I doubt that this has anything to do with the port issue.
p1458324: What do you mean by checking what port number is currently assigned to me? When I hover over the PIA taskbar icon, it reports in the tooltip pop-up "[port: 23838]". Am I wrong to assume that this is the one port that I should be setting uTorrent to use? And if this is not the correct port to be using, then where do I look to find the correct one?
Both: You both mentioned that UPnP should be disabled. I neglected to mention it in my post, but I did at one point try disabling it and found that it made no difference in regards to the port problem. (That said, disabling may still be wise advice.)
Thanks again for the advice and any further help for solving the problem.
UPnP is bad for security and privacy, but good for connectability. (These are often two sides of something.) Nonetheless I would strongly advise you to disable it since the reason you run a VPN at all is to be secure and private. And that is all hindred when that feature is enabled.
Regarding the proxy, even if it does not fix the problem, it is always a good idea to use it. The proxy reduces the trouble your system and the VPN servers have with too many small packets coming and going. It effectively bundles packets together to the normal MTU size and splits them on the other side. So instead of sending twenty different requests to twenty different IPs with the average request being a mere few bytes, it can bundle all of them into one packet and reduce the wasted space used as connection overhead. (I should have precluded this paragraph with TL:DR...)
Remember, your VPN client tunnels everything through the port you select in the VPN client. All your router sees is that VPN tunnel port and it's already "assured" if you were able to connect to PIA.
Just make sure that utorrent can open the necessary ports in windows firewall to receive connections.
As others have said, no need to use UPnP or NAT PMP because utorrent is NOT having to communicate with your router in this situation. Just manually enter the port you are given into utorrent.
I'm guessing your firewall is blocking things.
Also, trying to use the proxy in conjunction with VPN is really confusing things at the moment. You're connecting to NL VPN, why do you need the NL proxy as well??
I don't see any NAT PMP stuff in my router settings.
I have my router firewall turned off at the moment. Is it possible that Windows firewall is blocking the port when connected to PIA, but not when it is not connected?
I disabled Windows firewall. In uTorrent, the network test still reports the port is closed. In PFPortChecker, the TCP test failed, but the UDP test found that port 23838 was open.
Does this help to explain anything?
http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/
try that page inputting the port that's supposed to be open to test if it is indeed open. Only test when utorrent is actually active with a torrent. The servers are smart and won't open the port unless you are actually using it.
Also, the speed tests utorrent has are worthless. Bad idea to use that as an indication of torrent performance.
Still I doubt you are here asking for torrent advice in preparation to attack a NSA server or somesuch idiocy, so you are in no danger.
One thing I can tell you right-off is that you do not appear to be giving the client enough time to get adjusted to the VPN. At the bare minimum it will take minutes, and likely longer. On a less than perfectly seeded torrent, it can take as long as half an hour for all the settings to get worked out due to the distributed nature of a torrent cloud. So if you make a change and expect instant changes, you will always be disappointed. This is just the nature of it.
You may actually be giving it plenty of time. But your screenshots all say otherwise.
And I should clarify that it is not really a half hour. It is simply the time listed for each of your trackers. Nothing you change can really be relied upon to change until your trackers update.
When people have trouble with torrents I generally do point them at Linux ISO images since they are large and always better seeded than anything else on the entire Internet. If Linux Mint for instance cannot max out your download speed, then nothing can. (The tradeoff is that Linux ISO images ARE well seeded, so the odds are you will never upload a single byte. And since you mentioned upload speed as a problem I figured there was no point suggesting them.)
Here is one if you want to try it. It is a 1.3GB ISO.
http://torrents.linuxmint.com/torrents/linuxmint-17-cinnamon-64bit-v2.iso.torrent
utorrent may say the port is closed because it uses UPnP and NAT-PMP to ask the router if the port is open. In your case those functions should be turned off because the router doesn't need to open a port. If those functions are turned off in utorrent it will tell you it cannot test. but nevermind all this. use the site I gave you to test if the port is open. you did and it was indeed open so all is well.
I would suggest the following for utorrent.
http://gyazo.com/2c46509fe343ab84f1c79b981da9cb3c
http://gyazo.com/f6327fd7537112e4120727627c2dfbce
and if you cannot seed it could just be the torrent you're trying to seed has few leechers.
Why not make a different torrent all your own of something like one of the Linux ISOs and just give us a magnet link for your copy? That way one of us could test it if they had some time to kill. This would eliminate the chance that someone else was the only seed and you were being overlooked by the client for some reason. Be sure not to include the same trackers used by the real copy. Otherwise nothing is gained. (I realize this is probably nothing you will do. But I have no better idea to test it so we can be certain.)
*Edit* Unintentional Ninja post... I am reading your post now.
I have no idea how any of this happens to work as it does. The VPN does not change your torrent behavior intentionally. The torrent client does reset all connections when it transitions from peer to seed, but I would think it should retain the peer data it already had.
DHT is more than enough for a small scale test like this. But I should note that it is encouraging that you are seeding at all.
Obviously DHT is slower than normal trackers in some cases, but once it gets going it will be a good test of your upload speed and settings.
I know this is a royal pain in the ass. And I am sorry I am doing so bad at explaining what to do for a test, but I do not even use uTorrent. So my advice is coming from almost a decade ago. (The last time I used uTorrent.)