user1151: If I'm connected to 500 peers, will I know about transactions faster than if I'm only connected to 8 peers?

user323: As Bitcoin broadcasts its knowledge of new transactions only to a few nodes at a time, statistically speaking, being connected to more nodes will make it more probable you will get information on new transactions. I'm not sure how this would perform in practice, however. Forcing so many connections would probably be a drain on your system and outweigh the benefits.

user153: No, very little of the time for downloading new blocks is actually related to network transmission.
Most of the work being done is the I/O against your hard drive as the program writes data to the BDB database storage.  If you are on an encrypted filesystem, the problem is exacerbated.  There is some CPU work as the elliptic curve encryption is used when verifying the signature for each transaction so a faster CPU will help as well.
Some people use SSD disk storage and report quite respectable download times 
Some improvements are coming in v0.7 of the Bitcoin.org client but the real signficant performance improvement will come from the use of LevelDB and "ultraprune", both of which are expected in v0.8.

1151: <p>If I'm connected to 500 peers, will I know about transactions faster than if I'm only connected to 8 peers?</p>
 323: <p>As Bitcoin broadcasts its knowledge of new transactions only to a few nodes at a time, statistically speaking, being connected to more nodes will make it more probable you will get information on new transactions. I'm not sure how this would perform in practice, however. Forcing so many connections would probably be a drain on your system and outweigh the benefits.</p>
 153: <p>No, very little of the time for downloading new blocks is actually related to network transmission.</p>

<p>Most of the work being done is the I/O against your hard drive as the program writes data to the BDB database storage.  If you are on an encrypted filesystem, the problem is exacerbated.  There is some CPU work as the elliptic curve encryption is used when verifying the signature for each transaction so a faster CPU will help as well.</p>

<p>Some people use SSD disk storage and report quite respectable download times </p>

<p>Some improvements are coming in v0.7 of the Bitcoin.org client but the real signficant performance improvement will come from the use of LevelDB and "ultraprune", both of which are expected in v0.8.</p>
