I’ve tried both p2p and my closest regular server and don’t see any different in download speeds after trying multiple torrents twice on each server.
I think they are mostly to share P2P traffic on the same network nodes to not interfere with regular traffic on non-P2P specified servers. It’s a courtesy to other users and could help connect P2P with less hops. Not sure how much they have optimized for finding and connecting peers, but I do know it’s better for the health of the network to keep chatty P2P traffic separate if possible.
“P2P” doesn’t even make sense for NordVPN since they don’t allow port forwarding (meaning you can’t effectively use any P2P apps)
To add to that, not all data centres are willing to open all their ports for P2P traffic. Some data centres have servers that focus more on security and obfuscation so closing ports is more important to them. Let’s say when you press on quick connect to the US, it may choose a regular or P2P network but some regular servers also support P2P or I should rather say optimized for it. That’s why they made the P2P category so you’re guaranteed to get a P2P optimized server where all the ports are open and configured their servers to offer protection while keeping all their ports open. It requires more protection while leaving all these ports open for P2P traffic.
Ohhhh so say if you’re in a dorm and you dont wanna fuck up the internet for everyone else, you would torrent on one of the P2P servers?
Well I would imagine that universities/schools would dedicate traffic to each student’s account. Most schools use static IPs and divide the bandwidth based on device. A phone would be dedicated less bandwidth compared to a laptop or computer and wifi would get less bandwidth than a wired connection which is no surprise there.
They’d be running a 1 gbps or 10 gbps network but give each account anything between 300 mbps to 1 gbps. So let’s take your dorm example, it wouldn’t “fuck up” the internet if you were to torrent a massive file of 285 GB and you disabled the limit of peers while not using the VPN (let’s imagine this school allows P2P torrenting). If it’s via wifi it would Congress that frequency band and they’d shift everyone else to another frequency to prevent any noticeable slowdowns.
If it was via Ethernet then no one would notice as they’d grant you 1 gbps and each peer of the torrent is giving you between 500 kB/s to 4.5 MB/s so the network wouldn’t be collecting a whooping 50 MB/s in one shot, instead they’d get multiple speeds and block sizes at different time. This is all in theory if they didn’t block torrents.
While using your VPN the principle would be the same but encrypted traffic. So yes you’d get lower speeds but the school wouldn’t block or throttle it because they can’t tell unless someone sits there and monitors the traffic from your account specifically. Then again using Ethernet, I don’t think they’d be able to tell it’s you. So using Wireguard (Nordlynx) to torrent (a must do guide follows this so you don’t get your IP leaked) you’d not have any problems stifling the network for others. I have a guide on how to bind your torrent client and the VPN properly so it doesn’t leak. Let me know if you want that guide, I can paste it here.
Well, it depends on what you mean by “fuck up”. P2P creates a lot of “noise” with dozens to hundreds of simultaneous connections and increases the likelihood of malicious port scans to your advertised IP. I was saying it is a courtesy mostly for other Nord users, select P2P if that’s what you intend to do to keep the regular servers clear for browser traffic. It’s one of the reasons I think they added Presets, to get people to use the server selections as intended. With the growing popularity of VPN services among a less technical crowd they have to make it simpler to understand the different options.
In a dorm a lot of P2P is blocked, so the VPN can circumvent that to an extent, commonly requiring Obstification to connect out to the VPN server. It kills most of the chance of local direct sharing though, which used to be one of the main benefits of P2P in Dorms/Schools. Misconfiguration and DoS attacks are the more likely cause of dorm network "fuck up"s. It’s a good chance to learn some networking basics though and the support staff are more likely to help someone interested in learning actual networking and not just some circumvention techniques if you give them a call. There are a lot of products designed for schools/large networks and finding out which ones your institution uses gives a good start to researching “optimization” techniques.
It seems like you have a good basic understanding of networks, but some misconceptions as well. Traffic shaping is much more dynamic and MAC address based than your assumptions in this post. Large networks avoid static IPs (static anything) as much as possible in order to scale better. And traffic shaping on the layer 7 firewalls most large networks use now are using a mix of rules and heuristics to optimize traffic across thousands of devices. Administrators can drill down to user/device levels if they are alerted to outliers and easily make accurate assumptions of current (mis)use to generate or apply new rules to a single device, user, group, or network area, but are generally too busy to care and just leave it alone. Good administrators will only limit as much as necessary and try to keep blocking to a minimum. However, some admins get obsessed with other metrics that don’t fully align with end user experience and lock things down way more than needed. It’s usually coming from a “good” but misunderstood aspect of “security”, “protection”, “egalitarian”, or “high network availability” and a good argument and understanding can sometimes get you much better access on these networks.