Can you tell me why you've added "several dozen" addnodes? I'm asking because I want to know if there is some documentation I need to get updated that is causing people to think that they need to do this.
I'm running some timing tests on different bitcoind configurations. I'm curious as to various performance metrics.
However, based on the responses, I'm still unclear why I only see 8 peers - any ideas?
The number of connections does seem to go up and down quite a bit so check back a few times over the course of a day. Also just be sure you don't have a line like maxconnections=8 in your conf file.