Just out of curiosity does anyone use the settings the OP posts about in this thread?
I he or she makes some recommendations that I would like know if people are using or if there is some other sweet spot such as maxconnections= in bitcoin.conf?
Unless you have a very fast internet connection (both up and down) without any hard or soft caps I recommend you just block incoming bitcoind connections at your firewall (i.e. don't forward port 8333) and rely on outgoing connections (the default 8 is fine -- no need to increase this). That will avoid a lot of your bandwidth being used up by people wanting to download the blockchain.
That alone should substantially increase the number of people who are able to successfully run a p2pool node.