A couple of months ago (on march 5th, a little before the chart below starts) I added a "maxconnections=200" line to my bitcoind.conf and restarted the daemon. To my surprise, the number of connections stayed more or less in the same range as before, only a bit higher, but last saturday it spiked to ~200 out of the blue, with no apparent reason:
Does anyone have a clue why this might be?