Should I close my node once it has synchronised?

[Jet Cash]

I've tended to close my node once it has synchronised, and over the last few months, I seem to have had problems in finding and keeping peers. Over the last couple of days, I decided to continue to leave my node online, and this seems to have resulted in far more stable connections to my maximum of eight peers. The overhead is pretty low, and is recorded as being between 5 and 20 Kb/s. Most of it is around 5Kb/s over public WiFi. I appreciate that leaving my node online is beneficial for Bitcoin, but does it improve my relationship with other nodes?

My instinct is that my peers have got more important things to worry about, so maybe the apparent improvement is just coincidental.

[jackg]

The algorithm for suggesting nodes works as such (if there aren't limits on connections - simplified a bit):

1. ping neighbour peers and broadcast peers I'm connected to (I don't think many get sent but they can send up to 1000 and probably do it every so often).
2. receive pings from other peers
If >999 peers in peers.dat
(test ping speeds to see if any are faster than what you're already connected to)
do nothing
Else
test connections and add to list


My daemon automatically drops connections with a node after a while and picks up a new one, I think this is due to one taking less of a load and deciding it will be faster.

Thus leaving your node on means you have more access to established nodes who will get more connections (most likely ping speeds of <10ms are not uncommon) so it will mean your node is shared better over time and has a better history of being online but you will still get connections regardless normally.

It'd be interesting if there are ping speeds on your list of below 5ms as they'd most likely be people on your wifi - probably on the 10.10.x.x range or 192.168.x.x

[Jet Cash]

I've edited the original post from Mb/s to Kb/s. I realised I was looking at the data transfer total whilst listening to Brexit on YouTube. Obviously I am rubbish at multi-threading.

I'm running the node at Sainsbury's now, and getting much the same results, but with the odd 500Kb/s spike. I guess I need to try to find out if this will cause my connection to be throttled, but the usage is probably less than watching YouTube videos.