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If I understood correctly, a connection is outgoing if it was initiated by my node, otherwise it is incoming. Therefore, I was under the impression that with a fully synced blockchain, you should have many incoming connections (because many other nodes are currently downloading from you) and very few outgoing connections (because your node doesn't need to initiate a lot of connections, since its blockchain is up-to-date).

However, I've been running a VPS node 24/7 for several months now (hence it is fully synced), and at the time of writing it has 20 incoming connections and ~800 outgoing connections (I didn't put any limits on the number of connections).

How to explain such a high number of outgoing connections? Why does my node need to initiate all these connections, if its version of the blockchain is up-to-date?

user36303
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1 Answers1

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Your understanding is correct: outgoing connections are initiated by you, incoming connections are initiated by the peer. You can certainly have a peer syncing from you via an outgoing connection though.

The 800 connections is just a bug in the accounting. They're not all actual connections. You can see that using netstat or similar tool.

When a node is synced, it still needs connections to process new transactions and blocks. The default is to keep 8 outgoing connections, regardless of whether the node is synced.

user36303
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