Processing transactions is what mining is all about. Too many have forgotten that, believing that mining is about getting coin, and if you can throw in some transactions while you do it, why not.
But... processing the transactions is what our sole purpose as miners, actually is.
Probably be better off to keep the connection counts down to 2-4 on bitcoind, and low connections on p2pool as well, so we're sending data to less people, allowing them to be sent, faster, and let the meganodes with the bandwidth to handle it, focus on the wide redistribution.
It does no good for a node with a residential-quality upstream, to pass along block data to 50 nodes, if it takes 10 seconds to do it.
The torrent community fights about this too, and the best nodes you find that are sending to you fast, are the ones who aren't trying to keep 500 connections open, giving each peer just a few kB/s at a time, making block propagation just drag out forever, much longer than it should, with extra wasted overhead.
Block propagation suffers the same way. Less really is sometimes more.
-- Smoov
+1
I was trying to indicate bandwidth limitations earlier. I don't have any ports forwarded at all, to p2pool or bitcoind. I get 8 in on p2pool, and 9 in on bitcoind (atm). I'm also running namecoind and ixcoin for merged mining, I'd imagine they have 8 each as well. No problems at all, and my stale rate is usually lower than the pool, sometimes significantly moreso. When I start forwarding ports, that's when things get out of control.
M