no help with connecting to peers

[rebroad]

Quite often I find that bitcoind/bitcoin-qt can spend hours trying peers with no success. Would anyone have any suggestions on what the client could do in this situation or feedback to the user? For example, it could notify the user that the proxy server is unresponsive if that happens to be the cause, etc...

[gmaxwell]

Suggest that they move out of the oppressive dictatorship that they're in? :p It's inconceivable to me that it "can spend hours trying peers with no success" do you have any idea why it's doing this for you? Certainly it doesn't do this for me.

[sipa]

In case of a bad network connection, it may help if you increase the connection timeout, -timeout=N (with N in milliseconds, 5000 is default).