security - Why is torrent transfer speed reduced when using VPN?

I have been living in a country where recently access to Twitter and a week later, YouTube has been prevented by the command of the government.

There are ways to circumvent it but they are often web-based solutions which do not encrypt or secure Steam connection, torrent traffic etc.

I tried Spotflux VPN solution, however, when Spotflux is enabled, the torrent download speed is dramatically reduced. Once I disabled the app, I receive the expected result. (normal traffic)

• My first question is: Why does the download rate go so low once I activate VPN?

• Secondly, what if torrent traffic as well gets blocked by the command of the government like that happened to YouTube and Twitter? (what am I supposed to do to secure and avoid prohibitions)

When you connected to the internet through the gateway provided by your VPN provider, then you share the internet connection of that gateway with all other customers of that provider. That's why it's so slow.

Blocking Torrent traffic is a lot harder than blocking a single website. To block a website, they simply block all communication with a certain set of IP addresses. This would not work for Torrent traffic, as it is peer-to-peer.

The distance between your location and server location does affect the speed with which the Internet flows through the VPN. This slowness is due to the time it takes a data packet to travel back and forth over the VPN. Another influencing factor is the VPN server load. The encryption of a VPN can also levy a tax on speed. The faster your device’s processor and Internet connection are, the better.

Blocking VPN (like torrent transfer) is usually happened by basic port and protocol blocks. For this kind of blocking, Connecting through OpenVPN and SSTP protocols could be a workaround as it's the protocols least likely to be blocked by servers or firewalls and generally thought to be the most secure. It's because both PPTP & L2TP uses fixed ports, if your service provider or firewall blocks certain communication ports used by PPTP or L2TP, they won’t work while SSTP uses TCP port 443 that is almost certain to be open on almost all firewalls and openVPN can be configured to use any port (on the server side) and supports multiple protocols.

I know that this is an "old" post and all but I feel that I can contribute to the discussion at hand.

As Rose Ab writes a VPN will impact your system somewhat due to the encryption. If you are still experiencing slow speeds I would advice you to try and increase the CPU priority for the process called openvpn.exe or anything equivalent pertaining to your VPN solution. It should be enough to set it to "Above Normal". It really comes down to the resources in your rig.

The reason for increasing the priority of the process is that it is the one that handles the encryption of the connection and if this process struggles due to your CPU speed then everything that passes through it (torrents) will also fall behind.

-S