How many connections are you seeing on your Bitcoin client?

[gigabytecoin]

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?

[theymos]

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.

[Cryptoman]

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.

[theymos]

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.

[gohan]

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?

[humble]

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

[sandos]

67 incoming at the moment, and thats fairly normal.

[LMGTFY]

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.

[Jered Kenna (TradeHill)]

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

[deadlizard]

8 from day one. endless 8. 

[gigabytecoin]

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?

[river]

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

[humble]

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.

[theGECK]

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.

[hazzey]

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.

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).

[gigabytecoin]

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.

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?

[theymos]

Can that -maxconnections= only be changed using bitcoind?

No, it also works with the GUI version.

[mjsbuddha]

8 from day one. endless 8. 

same for me

[Beremat]

60

[kiba]

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