I am planning about launching a bandwidth-intensive service. My application will be running on a server with a full node, and I was wondering if I could disable peers from downloading historical blocks from my node to optimize the bandwidth for my application. Actually, stopping them from downloading any block from my node would also work 
I know many of you will not like this idea because it's selfish, but I already run a second, sometimes third, node. I am aware of the "blocksonly" mode, but it's not an option as I need a mempool.
I know many of you will not like this idea because it's selfish, but I already run a second, sometimes third, node. I am aware of the "blocksonly" mode, but it's not an option as I need a mempool.
Open your bitcoin console and run getpeerinfo
This shows you the other Node IPs, and their last reported starting height.
Pick two or three with the latest height, compared to the block explorer.
Then Create a Bitcoin.conf file
Use Connect= IP address
to only those IP adresses
This way only those 3 nodes keep you connected to the network allowing you access to the mempool and all other nodes are blocked from connecting to you.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man5/bitcoin.conf.5.html
connect='10.0.0.1:8333'
Use as many *connect=* settings as you like to connect ONLY to specific peers.