You should maintain a balance - Not much in a short period of time and also not so much less that you could not make any value to your site. Have some quality links, and see a boom in your ranking. But everything must be perfect.
My approach is to keep the maximum number of backlinks based on a percentage of visitors to the website per month which being ~10%. That way its slow and steady and keeps under radar wrt G's algo... G has a good idea as to the numbers of traffic - especially from SERPs and I am sure their algo raises flags when backlinking exceeds certain parameters based on that....