All Deluge Downloads freeze (SOCKS5 Proxy??)

[bengalih]

It's not really "to each their own", it is what is available that works and what doesn't.
Go ahead and google it:
https://www.google.com/search?q=split+t ... ge+windows
You'll see that almost everything is dated 3-4 years ago and going through the top couple of pages of hits you won't really find any solutions.
Even the Deluge doc page here:
https://dev.deluge-torrent.org/wiki/UserGuide/VPN
states:

The least traumatic [lazy] way to achieve Split Tunneling is a branded OpenVPN client of a Tier1 paid provider. By my estimates fewer than 10% offer this feature reliably.

Now I don't know when that was last updated, but I don't expect the current state of things is much better.
I don't doubt that much of what you say in terms of SOCKS5 privacy and possibly functionality is valid (though I do dispute your explanation of seeding over SOCKS5. I have uploaded plenty to private tracker and get peer connections who seed from me. This is without me downloading anything, since I am the originator of the upload), but I do dispute your assertion that setting this up on a Windows box which is also used for other functions (and thus the network connectivity of those other services cannot be compromised) is a trivial thing.

I've asked you, I've asked on reddit, I've asked other places several times over the past few years and as of yet no one has been actually been able to provide a solution.

[ambipro]

You are telling me that you think that Nord does not support port forwarding, but that your SOCKS5 circumvents their policy entirely?

The RFC supports a very convoluted and historically unimplemented method for accepting connections, yes. I have yet to see any clients or SOCKS5 daemons implement this in a widely usable way.

I did not say seeding is not possible. You are just the one establishing the initial connections.

Perhaps your setup is one of the few that either didn't exist when I last looked into this, or is special in some other way. However, I would say that if you go to something like https://portchecker.io and check your port being open, it is probable that you find it not open.

[bengalih]

I'm sure you are right my ports are not open with the SOCKS. I can verify that easily from within Deluge.

I am not up on the RFC and probably not as much as the under-the-hood information of how the protocol works as yourself.
All I can tell you is that when I upload a new torrent to my private tracker site using SOCKS5, people are able to connect to me to download it.
That being said, after I have seeded it out to at least one other peer who is active, I tend to not get many connections, but I do get some.
I have also run it for a while without the proxy or any other VPN, simply through my connection with a mapped port and it doesn't seem to make a difference in terms of my client being used as a seed. I can't explain to you how or why it functions, I've also only been using this tracker for a couple of months, but this is the behavior I see.

FWIW, this conversation did give me the impetus to try again with a VPN using some split tunnel solution. I think I actually made some headway. I've figured out some OpenVPN configuration that will seem to block all VPN traffic except for Deluge when configured to use the specific adapter. The problem with that configuration is that I am still unable to use port forwarding. That is both because a) it can't be done with the OpenVPN client and b) NordVPN doesn't support it. So I signed up for a trial of PIA (which I used to use their SOCKS proxy before Nord, but found better performance with Nord last renewal). PIA does support port forward, but I have to use their client on windows. I have tested with this and confirmed the port is open in deluge, but my download speeds are severely impacted.

I have a gigabit connection which my network equipment usually lets me access about 800-850mpbs on. I test with several public torrents with no VPN and can usually get to about 50Mib/s on my wired system and about half that on my laptop (on wireless which is limited to about 250mbps). When using the VPN, whether I install the software and connect directly or do some configuration in Deluge those two torrents fall to about 20-25 on the wired connection and about 10-15 on my wireless. Doesn't appear to be a Deluge issue either as I've tested with another client and see about the same.

So, even if I could (and seemingly might be able to) solve most of these other issues, I'm not willing to cut my transfer speeds down to half or less of what I am capable of achieving. I'm seeking out some other VPN trials to see if it is the service or not. I'm not sure what else it could be that limits it so.

[ambipro]

I'll PM you something that might help.