Bitcoin Forum

I have had mine running for almost 7 days straight without interruption on a 100mbps port. And I can only see about 35 connections maximum at a time.

It has dipped down to about 25 or so but 35 seems to be the upper limit for me.

How many connections are you seeing in your Bitcoin client right now? How long have you had it connected to the internet for without interruption? How fast is your internet connection?

I have 43 now. I checked yesterday and had about 50 then. I'm on AT&T U-Verse. My node is up 24/7, with only occasional periods of downtime. I've been running a public node at this IP address since before the first release of bitcoind.

I've been one of the built-in seednodes for a long time, so maybe that increases my connection count.

I'm at 97 right now, but it is usually 125.  I think there is a hard-coded limit at 125 connections because I've never seen more than that.  My uptime is about 120 days at this point, although I occasionally kill bitcoind briefly to update it.  Bandwidth is 10 Mbps.

Wow! I haven't had that many since the outgoing connection limit was reduced from 15 to 8.

I usually have fewer than 10 connections. Actually it climbs above that, up to more than 30, when I first launch the client (after a few hours of down time, otherwise it doesn't), then slowly goes down. What can I do to increase them? Does the client do disconnections based on connection quality?

The most I've ever seen is low seventies. I run a 24/7 daemon on a fast connection.

67 incoming at the moment, and thats fairly normal.

Currently 54. I've not closely monitored it, but it seems to be usually around 40 most times I've checked - I was surprised at 54 when I checked just now.

63 and I normally hang out around there. S. America but not sure if it matters.

8 from day one. endless 8.  ;)

I'm up to 45 today - seems to be a slight jump in my "max" of about 10 users.

How does one go about becoming a permanent seed node? I run a dedicated 100mbps and only restart my computer every few weeks. Surely I would be a great match for something like that.

Or does the bitcoin client choose them over time?

It depends on your firewall and router settings a lot .. if your behind a firewall you generally get way lower node counts ... 8 or less on average ..
if you have your firewall configured properly then you get more connections ..
my laptop (dynamic local ip) always gets about 1~8 connections ...
my dedicated machine with the firewall and router configured for it to run the server, gets about 70~115 connections on average

It's definitely helps with the over-all resilience of the network if you port-forward #8333 to your box running bitcoin(d) so that your connections will go above 8.

I noticed that I hit almost 100 on one machine the other day.

Always 8. I haven't wanted to take the time to figure out port-forwarding on my firewall, since it isn't listed in the massive database of "how to port forward" and there is no help for it online.

Just to combine these thoughts: after looking through the code, there is a hard limit of 125 total connections (can be changed with the "-maxconnections=" command.  There is also a hard limit of 8 outbound connections (only really applies to those behind firewalls who don't have port forwarding set up).

From what I understand, this means that your bitcoin client actively tries to connect to 8 other bitcoin clients.  After that, it is just waiting for other clients to connect to you (up to the 125 limit).

Can that -maxconnections= only be changed using bitcoind?

No, it also works with the GUI version.

same for me

60 :)

I never brother because I can't figure how to get around it. It's all too complicated for me.

66

i'll try it with -maxconnections=16, see if i can get more peers.

That will reduce the number. Maxconnections is the maximum number of total connections -- additional incoming connections will be rejected. (I also made this mistake for a long time.)

I just figured out how to configure port forwarding on my router and I'm getting 30 connections on average  ;D

Floating around 15-ish here.

Congrats!

Anyone else notice more connections on their linux boxes than their microsoft ones?

I also have endless 8's- even DMZ'd my router for the computer and still 8's.

higher tcp connection limit, perhaps?

I have 29 connections at the moment.
Usually I have about 35.

Unless you are mining, eight is more than enough.  It probably is even if you are mining.  Unless you are determined to get more, it's likely not worth the effort of tracing down the blockage.

opened my router and now @ 56

Hm ... I had 1 ... yes, one ... even though I kept the Bitcoin client open for a couple of hours. Restarted ... same ... after installing port forwarding on 8333, it now went up to 70 ... 75 ... whatever, plenty :-)

Sounds like you had some kind of active firewall that was interfering until you explicitly told it not to by opening up port 8333.

I've been seeing a lot more lately. Right now I have 117, and a few days ago it was at ~130.

I usually see one or two connections, but then I don't mine and I've forced the client to reject peer connections except those I explicitly tell it to connect to and forced it not to attempt to use the IRC channel at all.  If there were some way for clients to know that peers don't want them to announce them to their other peers, I'd use that to. 

I believe it is 8, let me double check, yep 8.  Still 8. I'm sensing a drop to 7, nope still 8, maybe it will rise to 9, drat still 8 :P.  Hey look it's 8 :o!  8,8,8,8, 8,8,8,8, I'm seeing double quadruple! Ahh! I'm thinking in factors of 8!! Anyway it's still 8.  ;) 

That is an indication that you can initiate connections, but any other peer trying to contact you is blocked.  It's harmless, anyway.

I never got a number larger than 8...

Is there anything wrong?

Varies heavily for me. Sometimes it will stay for hours at no more than 15 and sometimes it will get 120 connections in under a minute.

Updated my client so I could have less than 8 connections :D.

I'm in back of boondocks on a 45km wireless link (max 500 Kbps down) and if I open up to all connections, which I need to just make a node connection sometimes, it gets to >100 in no time and swamps my connection ... (10 Gbyte limit per month).

Anybody want to PM me some IP's I can point at to reliably get a connection without having to drown in bitcoin traffic? (I think there is something in client to that in conf file isn't there?)

edit: ooops, meant Kbps not Mbps

Search google for "bitcoin fallback nodes" and you will get a wiki page with a list of stable IP addresses that you can use.  Then start your client with -nolisten to reject incoming peer connections, -noirc to not bother listing on the irc channel so there won't be as many clients trying, and -connect=ip.address two or three times to specify the fallback nodes you wish to use.

Great, thanks.

after solving my port 8333 problem i have 42

I can see about 48 now... it seems to be steadily going up for myself over time.

Here's a fun trick (that will blow your mind the first time you see it!)

Quickly shut down your bitcoin client... and start it back up again...

It should almost immediately inform you that you have ~100+ connections... WOW!?!?

But I assume that it uses cached connections from the previous load... until it can find new connections and delete the old ones... which is why it does this.

Gavin/anyone care to explain?

I've had similar experiences where I restarted the client because it would not connect and it almost immediately showed connections ???.  I would love to see if someone had an explanation for this phenomenon. ;D

Until I opened up port forwarding it was at 8, afterwards its 100+ (113 currently). I would recommend people open up port forwarding, connections are much quicker and blocks seems to download quicker.

i have 125 :)

55 Right now...