How to increase monero node connectivity?

Question

I have a server in Germany with a monero node running.

1) I want my node to be informed about the appearance of a new block as faster as possible.

2) I also want other nodes to be quickly informed about my mined block.

What are the recommendations to achieve the best results for these two tasks?

My attemps:

• I opened the port 18080 so that my node accepts incoming connections from other nodes.
• I increased the limit of out-peers to 512.
• I increased the limit of in-peers to 1024.
• I added public nodes found on the internet through the parameter add-priority-node.

As a result, I got such a config file:

add-priority-node=opennode.xmr-tw.org:18080
add-priority-node=node.moneroworld.com:18080
add-priority-node=node.xmrbackb.one:18080
add-priority-node=uwillrunanodesoon.moneroworld.com:18080
add-priority-node=node.xmr.to:18080
add-priority-node=nodes.hashvault.pro:18080
add-priority-node=node.supportxmr.com:18080
out-peers=512
in-peers=1024

I got the following results:

• incoming_connections_count - 35
• outgoing_connections_count - 511

I think I need to increase the number of incoming connections. But I can’t understand how this can be done.

Answer 1

Some suggestions...

Relying on those publicly known/advertised nodes is probably a bad idea to start with. Lots of people use those as remote nodes for their wallets for example, so I'd expect the operators make sensible use of the limit-rate-... options.

Which brings me to the next point, what limit settings are you using? You should set these according to your available bandwidth and the amount of peers you plan to connect with.

Also, don't expect that just because you started with allowing an inbound of 1024 your node will somehow instantly have 1024 connections - it could take some period to fill that many.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, if you're not going to run your own set of geographically distributed nodes, thus want to have fast reliable connections to other people's nodes, you are going to want to write a script to ping and/or read the data rates as reported by print_cn for the peers your node finds and kick any that are particularly slow.