I’ve been putting off renewing my mullvad membership because of the port forwarding thing. I only want to use it for torrenting. Is it really crucial to find a VPN that supports port forwarding? If so, what’s the go to option now that it’s becoming increasingly uncommon?
It is not required but you will have a much better torrenting experience by being connectable (port forwarded). When you are fully connectable you are able to make direct connections to all peers in torrent swarms so overall your upload/download speeds would be faster and you can still participate in small torrent swarms.
When you are firewalled (not port forwarded) you can only make direct connections to peers that themselves are connectable (port forwarded).
In practice when you are in large torrent swarms it may not make much difference, there’s often plenty of connectable peers in large torrent swarms that you can connect with. However in smaller torrent swarms if no one is connectable then all the firewalled peers can only see each other, no data will transfer. They are all stuck waiting for a connectable peer to join the swarm & help with the data transfer.
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Now it makes sense why when occasionally my VPN will stop when I’m downloading, and I’m able to get a bunch more connections than usual.