Why is it such big deal for some people?
Torrenting my linux ISOs and public domain contenty and it seems to work fine without port forwarding?
The main issue is accepting incoming connections. When you are behind a NAT (as most VPNs are for IPv4) you need some solution (such as port-forwarding) to make your torrent client connectable. This causes a number of issues when torrenting.
- When someone starts a download they will try to connect to the seeders. If the seeders are not connectable this will fail.
- As a fallback when the seeders notice the leachers they will try to connect to them. If the leacher also isn’t connectable this will also fail.
If neither party is connectable the download can’t happen, so you may fail to get content that you want.
This is extra relevant if you are on private trackers where seeding is tracked, has direct value and is competitive. If you are not connectable every new downloader will immediately connect to the connectable seeders and finish the download before your client even knows that they exist. (reannounces for seeders can be very infrequent, such as hourly, so it will take an average of 30min for you to notice a new seeder and try to connect to them). This makes it very difficult to acquire much upload unless there are very few other seeders.
NAT is evil, all hail IPv6.
Torrent swarms need at least one connectable (port forwarded) peer for any torrent data to transfer. In large torrent swarms you won’t notice this too much since there are usually plenty of connectable peers available.
The effect tends to be more noticeable in smaller swarms.
In practice you may not notice unless you try to download those torrents with one lone seed who also happen to have no port forward. In those cases you’ll see there’s a seed but no torrent data ever transfers over to you. (note that the same happens in reverse if you’re the lone seed on many torrents)
Not everyone gets to decide the first level of networking they get unfortunately. Many ISP services block by default. Many folks are in shared networks.
Many of these situations effectively block the performance of torrents.
A lot of people torrent for piracy. No one is coming after you for torrenting Linux ISOs, so don’t worry about it.
A lot of people torrent for piracy.
I would never condone crime, good sir!
Neither would I. And don’t look at anything I’ve ever done.
