qBittorrent official forums

Surely this question has been asked before, but I could't find it in the forums. Apologies if this a repeat question:

I've always been a good community citizen, have my share ratio set at above 1.0. Seeding has always taken much longer than leeching for any given torrent. However, lately it has gotten to the point where seeding is virtually impossible. Why?

With my latest attempt, seeding a torrent that took overnight to complete, seeding is stuck at under 10% in over 4 days of continuous connection. To the point, this is the same torrent that downloaded "quickly" overnight. Peer and seed numbers in the swarm are not fantastic, but they're not zero either. The behavior is not isolated to any one torrent, seems like it's happening constantly these days. I get the same issues with a different torrent client on my phone, so it's likely not a qBittorrent client issue.

There are a couple of root cause explanations I could think of, but they "feel" like they're not the complete story. One, things are slow due to the security overhead of VPNs in general. Two, my ISP has throttled my bandwidth because they have detected VPN use and/or torrenting activity.

Any other thoughts on root cause? Thanks!

If qBitTorrent is not getting incoming peer connections because it's firewalled by the VPN and/or ISP, then it is virtually impossible to seed smaller torrents that have a decent number of seeds...especially if they are private flagged torrents such as on private trackers.

The first sign of a new peer on a torrent is its initial tracker announce, but by the time your seed does another tracker announce to possibly get that peer's ip address from the tracker...that peer might already be a seed.
On public torrents, Peer EXchange (PEX) lets peers+seeds pass around ip+port lists of other supposedly-working peers and seeds...so they hopefully don't have that problem. DHT also helps but runs much slower than PEX. Together DHT+PEX is better than either separate.

On top of this problem, qBitTorrent/Deluge (both use libtorrent) seem to have serious problems connecting or staying connected with peers/seeds:
index.php/topic,5820.0.html
http://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,1877.0.html
http://qbforums.shiki.hu/http://f.qbitt ... p?t=2.html
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorrent/issues/684
And especially this one:
https://github.com/qbittorrent/qBittorr ... -317431680