im seeing a lot of peers with connecton timed out and some that are connected but neither sending nor receving anthing - I assume packetloss - are there any knobs I could turn to potetially improve this?

Hello. Most likely this is normal situation. Other Bittorrent clients show only active peers (connected and transferring data), unlike them Tixati shows all peers. Timed out connections are usually peers with their client/machine turned off. Connected but idle peers are choking you, typically Bittorrent client connects to more peers than it sends data to, so again it's nothing to worry about.