If you have 0.91, I suggest you tick "prefer compressed connections" somewhere in the Config pane. (you might have to enable "expert mode").

This will do two things: it will smooth the traffic, allowing you to connect to more nodes for the same bandwidth, and it will cause gtk-gnutella to "cluster" with other compressing servents.

None of the servents issuing queries with unnecessary overhead support compression, so it will lower your dropping rate.

Use min=5, max=8 connections, and it will try to connect to 5 servents, whether or not they support compression, but will then deny further incoming connections unless they are compressed. It will try to maintain at least ONE uncompressed connection to avoid having the compressing nodes on one side, and the others elsewhere: you don't want to partition Gnutella...