How can I reduce the time until I get the newest block ? Does the number of the outbound peers affect the speed? I am running a full node on the Bitcoin network. Sometimes, I find that it takes a while until I get the newest block.
I checked the source code, and found that every node can at most connect to eight peers. Would it help to increase the number of connections, to reduce the time until I receive the newest block?
Up until the latest release (v0.9.3), more peers actually means slower synchronization typically, because we only really fetched from a single peer.

The upcoming release (v0.10.0) has a completely rewritten block fetching/validation mechanism, which first validates headers, and then fetches the blocks from all peers in parallel. The result should be much faster synchronization.