qBittorrent official forums

I have been using uTorrent 2.2.1 to for years to avoid the bloatware. Due to problems uploading, I decided to update qBittorrent and give it a try. To start, I left all settings at default .  I am running 64 bit Windows 7, connected through Comcast. My usual connection speed is about 160 -170 mBits; after it runs though the PIA vpn, i am down to 60 - 70 mBits by Speedtest.  So I chose 1 movie, about 10GB, and started downloading.  By default I was connected to 50 seeders out of 897, it was downloading at 1 to 1.2 MiB/s. With no other downloads or any uploads I was hoping for a faster download.  I paused the torrent, went into the settings and changed the maximum to 100.  I restarted the download and it immediately upped the seeders I am connected to to 98, but the download speed remains the same. After another 45 minutes it shows 99 seeders and the download speed is still 1.2 MiB/s.  So I switched it back to 50 maximum seeders and I still get 1.2 MiB/s.

Does the qBittorrent limit a single torrent's overall speed?  Why does the speed not go up when increasing the number of seeders when you have plenty of bandwidth? Any help to increase the speed, or a good explanation of the issue will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

The PIA VPN may be throttling BitTorrent traffic to about 10 megabits/second even though the speed tests show higher.
That'd work out to be about 1.2 MegaBYTES/second download speed in qBitTorrent.
PIA VPN may be throttling whenever it sees >20 connections at once or it may be monitoring your traffic via deep packet inspection to detect BitTorrent packets.

I did extreme speed tests of BitTorrent clients a few years ago, and easily reached speeds beyond 10 MB/sec from qBitTorrent and uTorrent:  https://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,3956.0.html
...when not using uTP! uTP seems very slow in qBitTorrent and even uTorrent is slowed down by using it.

uTorrent 2.2.1 has LESS problems uploading for me than qBitTorrent v4.1.2 or v3.1.16 -- but I am aware of the hidden max upload slot limits in uT 2.2.1 and mostly avoid the problems that can cause.