Bitcoin Forum

I eventually found the time to setup my first Bitcoin node. Hopefully I have the ability to host it in the Greek backbone network, at the Greek Internet Exchange (http://gr-ix.gr) (I don't know how long I'll be able to host it there though). I have a powerful machine as well, with 4 cores and 8 GB of RAM, and it can deliver up to 1 gbps in Greece and up to 100 mpbs overseas.

What I'm asking is how will I be able to optimize it. Considering its location and how powerful the server is, what can I do to have the maximum connections, etc?

Feel free to connect by the way:
IPv4: 83.212.119.206
IPv6: 2001:648:2ffc:1225:a800:bff:fe20:637f

Since you got port 8333 already open, just let it do it's thing. It will balance the connections it can handle itself.

I see you're only about half way there on the blockchain. You could consider using the latest release candidate which will speed up syncing significantly.

Great job for setting up the node.

Having a powerful computer would allow more incoming peers to sync and get blocks from you. The default max connection is 125. You can always allow more peers to connect by adding to your config where n is the maximum amount of peers to connect to you.

If you gonna keep it going you should have it listed in https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/

He doesn't need to list it. bitnodes has picked it up a while ago.

https://getaddr.bitnodes.io/nodes/83.212.119.206-8333/

oh alright, my bad. I had some issues with syncing a couple days ago that was my go to place thought we have to manually do it.

Thanks for the replies. The node has now finished downloading the block chain, and when I did a quick bitcoind getinfo, I realized that I had only 26 connections..

You have to give It time for people to discover and connect to your node. Anything above 8 means that you are currently having incoming connections which is already contributing to the network.

Yeah give it a couple of days. Mine goes up to around 60.
I have heard that too many connections is bad for the network. Not sure how much truth is in this.

with the old clients where wallets only connect to 1 servers its true. think of it as a motorway off ramp with one lane and something goes wrong to close the lane, you then have all those connections finding new nodes and in some situations acting like a ddos attack on weaker nodes

Hey guys,

Just an update: I updated Bitcoin core to 0.10 for some time now, and I get 90 connections. Because the max connections are set to 120 by default, should I raise it when the connections are near to this number? Or it will not be stable?

I just set up my first node, too.  I had it up for a couple weeks before I learned that I had to forward port 8333 on my firewall to the pc with the node, but now I'm up and running, too!  Congrats.

I just monitored the server and when it started to act slow or unresponsive I set the number of connections a bit lower than they currently are.