How to proceed after connecting with hardcoded node

Question

I have made the following changes in the bitcoin source code:

1. Disabled the DNS seed discovery in order to force bitcoind to fallback to connect to hardcoded nodes.

2. Changed the default hardcoded nodes to my known 4 addresses, lets say A,B,C and D, which I ensure are always online.

Now, when I run the bitcoind client it connects to one of the addresses, running the same modified version of bitcoind. It gets the peer addresses from the ode that it first connects to by exchanging getaddr and addr messages but I am not sure how it proceeds after that. 

What is a node falls back to connect to hardcoded nodes? is it supposed to connect to only one of the hardcoded nodes or can it connect to multiple nodes?

Then, after getting peer address via the addr message, when will the bitcoind client node start connecting to those peers ?

Answer 1

I am assuming that by hardcoded nodes you actually mean DNS seeds of nodes. When you run them through the DNS request you'll get a new node on every request. The hardcoded nodes is a backup mechanism if DNS fails. If the node isn't connected to its maximum capacity, it will try connecting to new nodes the second it'll get the addr message. You can find them here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/chainparams.cpp#L181