Connected but Slow: Work Through It in Order

Pages load, but downloads sit at a few hundred KB/s and video is stuck at 480p. This is the kind of problem people fix by randomly changing things. Working through it in order saves a lot of time.

Separate latency from bandwidth

The number next to a node is latency: how quickly it answers, which says nothing directly about throughput. An 80 ms node might cap out at 5 Mbps while a 200 ms one saturates your line. Measure with a real download — pull a large file — instead of reading conclusions off the latency figure. Details in latency testing.

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Check these in order

1. Try other nodes — three or four from the same subscription. All slow means the problem is on your side or provider-wide; one slow node is just that route;
2. Check your remaining quota — plenty of providers throttle to a few hundred KB/s after you go over rather than cutting you off. Easy to misdiagnose;
3. Turn TUN off and compare — TUN adds a virtual adapter, and on some NIC drivers that genuinely costs throughput. Test once on system proxy, see system proxy vs TUN;
4. Test at a different hour — 20:00 to 24:00 local is peak congestion on international links. A threefold day-versus-evening difference on the same node is common.

What you can tune locally

• Too many rule sets slows matching on every new connection — trim to four or five, see reducing memory use;
• A poor DNS setup adds hundreds of milliseconds before each connection, which feels exactly like "slow" — see DNS settings;
• Confirm the site is actually going through the proxy. If it's going direct to a throttled overseas host, no amount of node swapping helps. Check on the Connections page.