Why connected node count have dropped since august 1st? before 1st august i used to connect to 55+ nodes on my bitcoin-core, even if i kept the bitcoin-core running for 12 hours.

but after 1st of august, the connected nodes count is not going above 15-23

why is that ?

what changed on august 1st ?

i  got that number when i do

bitcoin-cli getinfo
A common cause for a node's connection count going down and staying down for a while is IP address changes: It can take a while for knowledge of the new address to percolate in the network.

Otherwise, your prior high count could just have easily been caused by an attack or spy-peers that have since stopped.

It's a bit hard to say since the expected number of peers of a listening node depends on how many other peers are in the same /16.