@c0deright

```bash echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches time ls -l /data/geth/geth/chaindata >/dev/null real 0m2.248s user 0m0.229s sys 0m0.622s ``` over 2.2 seconds to generate the directory listing for a little over 70.000...

Just now i notice that only the 4 peers my nodes connect to have "last_contact": "success" in `nodes.json`, all others have `failure`. Trying telnet on the IPs listed with "failure"...

[nodes.json](https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum/files/3898821/nodes.json.txt) from one of my VMs.

@joshua-mir Please see my comment above with my nodes.json file. Discovery looks like it's working but all but 4 peers are non-functional. My VMs in question all run on AWS....

I edited `nodes.json` again and only left the 4 working nodes in. Then started parity. Waited some minutes. 4/10 peers. Stopped parity. Looked in `nodes.json` again. The 4 working nodes...

I didn't change anything on security-group since ages. The VMs in question don't have restrictions on outgoing traffic. They go out over a NAT gateway, so my VMs have no...

Right now one has 8 peers, the other two have 9 peers. I have a feeling that over time the peer count will only decrease but never increase. But we'll...

Thanks for your quick help, @joshua-mir What's the DNS names parity tries to connect to when it has an empty `nodes.json`?

@joshua-mir Since starting my 3 VMs with your `nodes.json` file they have been running with 7-10 peers constantly. I still find the distribution between working peers and failing peers appalling:...

@or2008 My *workaround* was to use the `nodes.json` provided from @joshua-mir and after that never delete it again. You can try with my file in the meantime: [nodes.json.txt](https://github.com/paritytech/parity-ethereum/files/3960577/nodes.json.txt) Could we...