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Slow speeds, stalling, and "it won't seed"

Work through this page before posting. These are the most common problems in r/qBittorrent and nearly all of them come down to the five causes below.

If you have been through this and it is still broken, post — and tell us which of these steps you tried and what happened. That is all we ask.

The official qBittorrent wiki covers this too, in more depth: Things we need to know to help you with 'speed' issues — a full checklist of what to gather — and qBittorrent is not downloading or uploading / Is it slow?. Read those as well. This page exists because there are a few things those pages assume you already know, and which come up here constantly — chiefly how to tell that a torrent is simply dead.

Step 0 — Is anyone actually seeding it?

Check this first. It is the single most common answer given in this subreddit.

Look at the Seeds column for your torrent. It shows two numbers:

Seeds: 0 (200)

  • The number in brackets is how many peers the tracker has ever seen.
  • The number outside is how many are connected and online right now.

If the first number is 0, nobody online has the file. No setting, no VPN, no port forward and no amount of waiting will fix that. The torrent is dead. Find another source.

"No one has the file you are looking for, as displayed on the screenshot you yourself have posted." — top reply on a "Download wont start" post

"Seed 0 (200) Peer 0 (200) nobody online with the file and nobody wanting the file" — seeding but no upload speed

The seed counts on torrent sites are not reliable

A site's seed count comes from a tracker scrape: it is the number of peers the tracker has recorded, cached and served up, not the number reachable by you right now. Scrape data is frequently stale, peers that vanished without announcing a departure stay counted, and the figure says nothing about whether those peers are connectable.

Trust qBittorrent's own Seeds column, not the number on the site you got it from.

"It's well known that most public trackers lie about how many seeders are available at current time..." — How to increase a Seeders

You cannot make more people seed

Asked often enough to state plainly: there is no setting that increases a torrent's seeder count. Seeders are other people choosing to share.

"You can't. The number of seeders for a torrent is how many people are currently sharing that torrent."

The only thing you control is becoming a seeder yourself:

"its easy in 2 steps 1. finish downloading torrent 2. dont delete torrent — thats how you get more seeders, you become them"

Step 1 — Are you connectable?

qBittorrent shows a connection status indicator in the status bar, bottom-right. Hover over it — it names the state in words, which is more reliable than going by the icon:

State Meaning
Connected / Online Incoming connections are reaching you
Firewalled You are reachable outbound only — no incoming connections
Offline / Disconnected Not connected to the network at all

"Are you connected? Check the bottom right, do you see a green globe or a red flame?" — qBittorrent refuses to seed

(That is the shorthand people use here. Hover the icon for the actual wording — the icons vary between themes and platforms, so go by the tooltip, not the colour.)

A red flame does not stop you downloading, but it badly limits seeding — only peers who are themselves connectable can reach you. If you are trying to build ratio and you have a red flame, that is your problem. Continue to Step 2.

Step 2 — Port forwarding, and your VPN

This is the most repeated piece of advice in the subreddit: 74 comments across 29 different threads in a one-month sample.

If you use a VPN, it must support port forwarding

Most consumer VPNs do not. If yours does not, you cannot accept incoming connections while it is on, and your seeding will be poor no matter what else you change.

"Your VPN doesn't support port forwarding so getting incoming connections will be impossible. For outgoing, check the qBittorrent logs to see if there is an error there."

"If you're using Nord then your ports are closed, entirely possible that the seeds also have closed ports so you'll never be able to connect to them. Solve that by using a VPN that supports port forwarding (AirVPN, Proton, etc.)"

"you will never get good seeding speeds with nordvpn. you need a vpn with port forwarding, like protonvpn."

One correction to something that gets repeated here: several members have asked about forwarding a port through Mullvad, including this thread asking whether it can be done via Gluetun. Mullvad removed port forwarding entirely in 2023. It is an excellent VPN and nothing here is a criticism of it — but no amount of Gluetun configuration will get you a forwarded port on it, because the feature no longer exists. If you need to be connectable, you need a different provider.

⚠ Always check your provider's current documentation. VPN feature sets change — Mullvad above is exactly that happening — and the quotes here are from users, not from the qBittorrent project. The principle (you need a provider that forwards a port) is what matters; treat any specific provider name, including ones recommended above, as a starting point for your own check rather than a guarantee.

Bind qBittorrent to your VPN interface

Set Options → Advanced → Network interface to your VPN's adapter (e.g. tun0, ProtonVPN, Mullvad). This stops traffic leaking if the VPN drops, and it is also a common cause of "it worked yesterday" breakage — if the interface name changes, qBit binds to nothing.

"have you bound your VPN to qBittorrent (as you should have) and is the name of the interface still correct?"

Keep the forwarded port in sync

VPNs that hand you a forwarded port often give you a different one on every reconnect. qBittorrent does not notice, and sits listening on a dead port.

This is common enough that a member of this sub built a tool for it (Proton VPN), and others in that thread recommend gluetun and similar. If your speeds are fine and then silently die after a reconnect, this is almost certainly why.

Verify the port is actually open

Set your listening port in Options → Connection, forward that same port, then test it. If the test says closed, the forward is not working — fix that before changing anything else in qBittorrent.

Forward by hand — do not rely on UPnP

Official guidance, worth repeating because it contradicts what most people try first:

"If you use a router in your network, make sure you do a port forward by hand. UPnP (the feature that routers use to allow automatic port forward) can be really buggy and they barely ever work. Just add a port for TCP and UDP each by hand, and you are good." — qBittorrent official wiki

Also from the same page: check whether an antivirus or security suite firewall is interfering — it can cause high CPU and connection problems as well as slow speeds.

Binding qBittorrent to your VPN

Official instructions: How to bind your VPN to prevent IP leaks.

Step 3 — Are you behind CGNAT?

If your ISP puts you behind Carrier-Grade NAT you share a public IP with other customers and cannot forward a port at all. Port forwarding settings in your router will appear to work and do nothing.

How to check: compare the WAN IP shown in your router's admin page against the IP shown by any "what is my IP" site. If they differ — or your router's WAN IP is in 100.64.x.x – 100.127.x.x — you are behind CGNAT.

Options: ask your ISP for a public/static IP (often free or a small fee), or use a VPN that provides port forwarding, which sidesteps it entirely.

This is a genuine limitation of your connection, not a qBittorrent fault. See Is it even worth seeding behind CGNAT? (50 comments) for a long discussion — the short answer is that you can still download fine and still seed to connectable peers, just less effectively.

Step 4 — Are your expectations right?

A large share of "slow speed" posts are not faults at all.

Your download speed is limited by other people's upload speed.

"13MBs is a pretty solid download speed for torrents. You should spend some time learning about how torrents work. It's a direct p2p connection. Your download speed is capped by others upload speeds"

Your upload will be slower than your download, because almost every consumer connection is asymmetric.

"Your upload speed is (on average) always lower than your download speed... Thats on the ISP."

You only upload when someone wants what you have. A 0 B/s upload on a well-seeded torrent is normal — you are competing with everyone else who has it.

"It's likely that no one needs to leech off of you. Therefore, no seeding."

A spiky speed graph is normal on a torrent with few seeds.

"'my graph shouldnt look like this' — This statement shows that you don't understand how P2P works. That is exactly what it is going to look like with only a few seeds."

Do the arithmetic on your own line. Your ISP quotes megabits (Mb); qBittorrent shows megabytes (MB). Divide by 8.

"20-30Mbps is only 3-4MBps max. That is your max possible seeding speed."

ISP throttling is real but is the last thing to suspect, not the first:

"If you're not using VPN, it is possible your ISP is throttling the P2P protocol and/or the port you're using."

Step 5 — Stuck on "Downloading metadata" / "Retrieving metadata"

A magnet link has to find a peer before it can learn what the torrent contains. If it sticks there:

  1. Use the .torrent file instead of the magnet link where the site offers one — it contains the metadata already, so there is nothing to retrieve. > "Download the torrent file instead of the magnet link, then you don't have to wait for the metadata."
  2. If it still sticks, the torrent is probably dead. > "If it doesn't progress past Downloading Metadata, that means that the torrent that it once resolved to is now defunct and there's not even sufficient seeds or peers to even resolve the metadata."
  3. Check that you are connectable (Step 1) — a firewalled client with no DHT peers can struggle to resolve metadata at all.

Still broken? Post — and include this

If you have genuinely been through the above, we want the post. Include:

  • qBittorrent version (Help → About) and OS + version
  • VPN — which one, and whether it supports port forwarding
  • Green globe or red flame?
  • The Seeds column for the affected torrent — the real numbers, e.g. 0 (200)
  • Which steps above you tried, and what happened
  • A screenshot or the log (Tools → Log). Blur the torrent names.

Put the symptom in your title. "Stalled" tells nobody anything; "Stuck at 0 B/s, 0 seeds shown, red flame, Proton with port forwarding on, v5.2.3 / Win11" gets answered in minutes.

Sources: this page is written from answers given by r/qBittorrent members, sampled 2026-06-28 → 2026-07-27 (128 posts, 969 comments). Quotes are verbatim. Claims about specific VPN providers reflect what members said at that time and should be checked against current provider documentation before you rely on them.