µTorrent proxy settings: which of the four proxy types carries peers, and how to count it on Windows

In µTorrent Classic the proxy sits behind Options > Preferences > Connection, where the vendor's help centre lists four Proxy Server Type values: SOCKS4, SOCKS5, HTTP Connect and HTTP. The one sentence that decides which to pick is from the same article: "Peer communication proxying is not supported with standard HTTP proxies, and UDP proxying is only supported with SOCKS5." So choose SOCKS5 with the SOCKS5 port from your order, or HTTP Connect with the HTTP port, and never plain HTTP if the peers are what you want covered.

What follows is a way to check that on your own Windows machine, because the help article is all the documentation there is, and we could not run µTorrent ourselves: our test lab is Linux containers. Everything below that we did not read in the vendor's documentation is marked as such.

#The limits, before the setup

• The meter runs both ways. On residential, and on a shared IP past its included gigabyte, you pay per GB, and a torrent you seed sends its payload through the proxy a second time. How traffic is counted is in our terms. Dedicated ISP and datacenter IPs have no bandwidth cap.
• No UDP through our SOCKS5. We do not advertise UDP relay, so DHT, UDP trackers and uTP will not run through the proxy even though µTorrent can relay UDP over a SOCKS5 server that supports it. An HTTP or HTTP Connect proxy cannot carry UDP at all.
• No encryption. A proxy relays bytes; it does not encrypt them. µTorrent's protocol encryption only obfuscates traffic so that ISPs cannot identify it as BitTorrent.
• Anything outside the proxy is you. A connection the client makes directly shows your own IP to the other end.
• The right tool for a copyright worry is a VPN, as the qBittorrent project's wiki tells its own users. We cover lawful swarms, and using our proxies for unauthorised sharing is not allowed by the allowed-use policy.

#Which proxy type to choose

The help centre names only standard HTTP as unable to carry peers, so SOCKS5 and HTTP Connect are the two left. What it says about trackers, it does not say; the count below shows it.

HTTP Connect is, in the help centre's words, an HTTP proxy "that support[s] arbitrary TCP connections". That relies on the proxy allowing CONNECT to whatever port each peer listens on. Many commercial HTTP proxies allow CONNECT only to port 443; whether a given product does is a question for its provider, and the count below shows the answer for yours.

#Settings we could not confirm

The help article stops at the type list. We found no current primary documentation for:

• the username and password fields and whether they apply to every type;
• per-traffic toggles, such as proxying peers but not trackers;
• the proxy "privacy" checkboxes that older guides describe, which cover local DNS lookups, identifying features and connections the proxy does not support. Their current labels are not documented, so we do not quote them.

If your build shows checkboxes like these, the measurement below tells you what each one does, which is better evidence than any label.

#Count the connections on Windows

1. Confirm the proxy works and note its exit address with the curl line on our proxy checker. Windows 10 and 11 ship curl.exe.
2. Find the proxy's IP: Resolve-DnsName HOST in PowerShell.
3. Start a lawful torrent, such as an Internet Archive item, and let it run for two minutes.
4. Find µTorrent's process ID in Task Manager's Details tab, then:

$p = 1234
Get-NetTCPConnection -OwningProcess $p -State Established | Group-Object RemoteAddress | Sort-Object Count -Descending | Select-Object Count, Name
Get-NetUDPEndpoint -OwningProcess $p | Select-Object LocalAddress, LocalPort

With peers proxied, the first command prints one line: your proxy's address, with every connection counted against it. Any other address is a peer seeing your own IP. The second prints the UDP port µTorrent listens on. In Wireshark, the display filter udp.port == THAT_PORT && !(ip.addr == PROXY_IP) shows UDP leaving outside the proxy; with a TCP-only proxy, a correct setup shows none. If DHT and uTP go direct instead, turn them off in the client before trusting it with the proxy. Our Windows proxy guide covers the system-wide proxy setting, which is a separate thing from the client's own.

#Classic and Web are different programs

The vendor's product pages list µTorrent Web for Windows and Mac and µTorrent Classic for Windows, Mac and Linux, plus an Android app. The proxy article describes Classic. Whether the Web edition has a proxy setting at all, we could not confirm. The release notes are another reason to measure rather than trust: the last public desktop entries are Classic 3.6.0 (build 46590, November 22, 2022) and Web 1.2.10 (October 12, 2022). Whether newer builds have shipped since through auto-update, we could not confirm either.

#What an Internet Archive download costs on the meter

The Internet Archive says "over 1.4 million Archive Items are available via the BitTorrent protocol". Take a 10 GB public-domain collection: proxied peers move at least 10 GB in. Seed it back to a ratio of 1.0 and that is 20 GB, $79.00 on residential at checkout, plus protocol overhead and the "wasted" pieces µTorrent's help centre describes as common. A datacenter IP is $1.90/IP (dedicated) a month with no bandwidth cap, subject to port speed and fair use. Peer-to-peer traffic for lawful content is fine on residential and on dedicated ISP and datacenter IPs, which carry no traffic meter. Run your own figures through the cost calculator, and cap the upload rate in µTorrent if the meter is the constraint.

For a client whose proxy behaviour is documented down to the checkbox and the config key, see our measured qBittorrent guide, and the torrent client comparison for all fifteen side by side.