Hi, I’m running qBittorrent 4.5.0 on Windows 10 Home and using PIA VPN (I also have Nord VPN, but I just leave it off). I have it set up so it stops traffic if the VPN drops. I’m running gigabit internet and am writing to a Seagate 5TB HDD. The torrents I download are popular, so availability isn’t an issue.
For some time, but more frequently lately, I’ll start a download, which will go extremely fast (7-12 MiB/s) then after a minute or two it begins to drop like a stone until it hits 0 b/s and then PIA will show as being disconnected. The VPN refuses to reconnect. The only way to reconnect is to disconnect the internet then reconnect the other band. The only exception is sometimes I can get it going again by switching back and forth between TPC and uTP. I’ll get about a minute or two of downloading before it drops off again. This only appears to happen when I’m downloading something. Otherwise, the VPN stays connected for weeks. Connecting via ethernet does not fix the issue. If I need to go to the PIA sub, I’m happy to do that. Just wanted to try my luck here first. I’m so tired of babysitting my torrents until they finish downloading. Any help at all would be SO appreciated!
I have it set up so it stops traffic if the VPN drops.
Need some clarity here. Kill switch causes unexpected behaviors and may be the culprit. Binding is important and should be on.
Update: I may have fixed the problem by trying the ethernet connection again. Not sure why it didn’t work before, but I just finished a 5GB download with 0 drops. It makes me wonder what the issue could be then, but for now I’m happy it’s working.
The number of connections generated by qBittorrent might be overwhelming the VPN.
Also, you having gigabit internet doesn’t really matter with a VPN, you need to tune your qbittorrent settings to match the speeds you get through your VPN, not your normal internet connection.
Sure, it’s set up through qBitTorrent. I don’t have a kill switch enabled through the VPN app. So basically qBittorent won’t let any traffic pass of not through the VPN. Is that called binding?
I’m not only having the same issue but our set up is identical, down to using PIA but have Nord just not on. Only exception is that I am connect via Ethernet and still bottlenecking myself still. Has your problem stopped? Did you try something else to fix it?
That’s really interesting and makes a lot of sense! Thank you! Now that I think about it, it does tend to happen more with torrents that are really popular. So I would want to limit speeds according to the VPN and rein in the number of peers I connect to? Does that also mean that my VPN is the bottleneck in my setup? My speeds get so high but collapse as soon as they do; it’s super frustrating. If so, I might switch to my Nord one and see if that helps.
Hey, I don’t have the issue anymore, but honestly I’m not sure what fixed it. I’ve had so many problems that I’ve had to troubleshoot over the last year. Best advice I can give uninstall and reinstall qbittorrent and PIA with default preferences then bind QB to PIA through QB preferences. Don’t even mess with the kill switch and split tunnel stuff. It’s unreliable and just complicates things. Also I’d make sure your firewall isn’t messing with either program. I recall going into kinda granular firewall settings and having to whitelist those programs. It was affecting them even though the firewall was turned completely off (for diagnostics). Good luck!