While attempting to make a transaction I am noticing that GUI wallet and CLI wallet is estimating something like 0.00004436 xmr fee (very slow / unimportant) but when I attempt to submit the transaction the xmr network is demanding something like 0.004048 xmr as fee. While this is not prohibitive fee I have never seen that much variation in estimated vs actual fee before. I have sent a transaction from the same wallet may be within a month back. The estimated fee was 0.00004436 xmr and actual fee was 0.00004444 xmr. It is strange to see actual fee being 20x to 100x times estimated fee.

1. Did anyone else experience this? Do the wallets not estimate fees well when we have more than 2 parties?
2. Does the fee increase with the amount being sent? – I think not but would like to know your opinion and reason. I think the fee increases with number of sending / recipient address but that would not explain this much increase in fee.
3. Does history of an wallet increase transaction size? – I don't think so but again what do I know.
4. A lot of transactions with the numbers of in / out same as my transaction are being included in the blocks without paying as high fee as the chain is demanding from me.

5. I have a local node running in my machine that has 64 peers including supportxmr and hashvaultpro and is synched. I rarely get in_peers that had been the case years before when xmr blockchain was not this big. Wallets are synched with localnode.

6. I am using the latest version. 0.18.2.2