I started bitcoind running on a Linux machine, averaging 60+ connections. Now I'm suddenly and quickly exhausting my monthly data usage limit on my ISP.
Is decreasing the "maximum connections" in my configuration file the best way to keep bitcoind running/contributing full time, but without such a heavy data usage on my account?
Sure, add maxconnections=16 in your bitcoin.conf to limit yourself to 16 connections, for example. If you want to go below 16 or so, I'd recommend you run listen=0 instead (so you'll only have outbound connections).
I'm planning on working on a number of bandwidth reducing options for the next major release after 0.10.
0.10's parallelized block download will also reduce the variance in bandwidth usage that other nodes on the network experience.
