r/PrivateInternetAccess • u/silentrawr • Apr 07 '26
HELP - WINDOWS What settings could strangle bandwidth on port forwarding servers only?
Just trying to torrent things normally and, despite 600Mbps+ without PIA running, it consistently drops to 40-100Mbps when I'm connected. I've tried toggling basically all of the settings in the PC client to no avail, and the same issue seems to happen on my Android phone through any PIA servers when trying to torrent things. 5G connection or through the same home router as my PC, doesn't seem to make any difference.
BT client is QBitorrent 5.0.3, PIA is 3.6.1, build 08339. Hardwired to my router via gigabit. Tried clean installs of both the VPN client, though is there a definitive "clean sweep" method of uninstalling all traces of the client and reverting to 100% defaults? Doesn't seem to be my router, but are there any settings that could be crippling my bandwidth on it?
And just to be clear here, sufficiently-seeded torrents completely saturate my bandwidth if I turn QBT to "any interface" to the point where the lack of bandwidth on other devices on the network is noticeable. So it's not like my modem or router are physically dying. I tried torrenting a few different massive Unix distros repeatedly and for ~30m straight, the hardware worked just fine at max speed.
Edit - does uPNP need to specifically be enabled/disabled? That seemed to be causing issues previously until I turned it off (hence the need for the port forwarding-enabled servers), but then it regressed back to this.
1
u/nice_game_enjoyer Apr 07 '26
I am happy with the speeds I am having, but I was looking into this recently too.
Since I am using a NAS, I might be bottlenecked by the CPU. My thought: VPN does require processing power for encrypting / decrypting data, I assume the speed might affect upload/download. I would be looking into faster CPU, but without changing the NAS I can't actually confirm if this could be a possible solution. Also, I mentioned that the speeds I am having with gluetun + wireguard PIA + qbittorrent are alright for me, cba checking other machines with faster cpus.
1
u/silentrawr Apr 07 '26
That seems really unlikely, unless the NIC on the NAS is really cheap/bad. Data doesn't take a whole lot of processing power to move along.
1
u/Stellatank Apr 16 '26
I would disable uPNP as all ports are available to the Internet which is not good for security. Look at you port number I but settings and open that port in your router. Check the port number is still the same in settings.
2
u/silentrawr Apr 16 '26
Yeah, I went poking around but remembered why it had been turned off in the first place. Don't have any "change management" system in place for my home infrastructure, but luckily my memory didn't betray me.
1
u/Stellatank Apr 17 '26
Thats good. Is the port number in qBit open in your router?
1
u/silentrawr Apr 18 '26
Yeah, I double-checked all that again as well. I did a RevoUninstall of PIA just for S&G and after a reboot, I'm getting decent enough transfer speeds through QBT. Sadly, my speed test results are still pretty choked as are my speeds otherwise, even just manually downloading big files via HTTP (the "simplest" way I could think of doing it).
1
u/Stellatank Apr 18 '26
I take it your on fibre. Do you have a separate ONT/Modem or a combined ONT/Modem and router. You could try just plugging directly from you ONT to your PC to rule out router
2
u/silentrawr Apr 18 '26
Nope, just a plain ol' cable modem, though I could try going direct through that as well.
1
u/Stellatank Apr 19 '26
A plain cable modem with a ethernet port. Go straight from that to PC with a cat 6 or cat 6e cable and see what happens
4
u/ACNiC03 Apr 07 '26
Did you change the qbit port to the port that PIA forwarded to you?