Focus On What Matters: Bitdefender VPN Gets New App Traffic Optimizer Feature

Privacy violations can take various shapes online, such as government surveillance, surreptitious tracking or traffic monitoring. As these intrusions grow more common by the day, specialized tools like VPNs can help you protect your privacy.

VPNs redirect your traffic through a secure tunnel while using robust encryption algorithms to protect it. However, this combination of techniques can have some drawbacks, mainly concerning the connection’s speed.

Several factors can trigger connection slowdowns, the most common being the distance to the server you’re connecting to, network congestion and high bandwidth usage.

Some apps are more demanding than others

Certain apps and services, such as streaming platforms, torrenting clients and games, require more bandwidth. Constantly using them could affect your connection speed.

For instance, you may suffer severe lags in your online game if you also set the torrent client to download files in the background. Or you could experience poor download speeds if you’re also running a bandwidth-intensive game.

Routing your traffic through a VPN tunnel already subjects your connection to a relative slowdown; placing additional strain on your connection can seriously degrade your online experience.

In this situation, the most obvious solution would be closing any bandwidth-demanding app or service you don’t immediately need. A far more convenient solution, though, is proper traffic management.

Prioritizing app traffic

Bitdefender VPN introduces App Traffic Optimizer, a new feature that can help you tackle VPN connection slowdowns by prioritizing it to the app of your choice.

The feature lets you decide what apps should receive the bulk of your traffic, then allocates the resources accordingly. For instance, if you’re in a meeting and notice that the quality of your call is subpar, App Traffic Optimizer lets you prioritize traffic to the app for better results.

Typically, in a similar situation,VPN users would resort to closing all interfering processes on their device or even disabling their VPN connection. App Traffic Optimizer lets you enjoy uninterrupted privacy protection without compromising your connection speed.

App Traffic Optimizer

Currently, the feature is only available on Windows devices and lets you prioritize traffic to up to three apps. Follow these steps to enable and configure it with minimal effort:

1. Launch the Bitdefender VPN Windows client
2. Click the gear-shaped button in the side pane to access the client’s settings
3. Head to the General tab
4. Enable the App Optimizer feature
5. Click the + button
6. Browse to the location of the apps for which you want to optimize traffic
7. Reconnect to the VPN server of your choice

It’s important to re-establish the VPN connection after enabling the App Optimizer feature, especially when adding or removing apps from the list.

Optimize traffic without interrupting the VPN connection

If you ever felt that sometimes your VPN places an unnecessary burden on your connection and slowdowns constantly get in your way, there might be a better answer than disconnecting.

Bitdefender VPN’s App Traffic Optimizer lets you prioritize traffic to the most important apps on your device without exposing your connection to privacy hazards.