Proxy Speed & Latency

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What latency means in a proxy setup

1. Your client connects to the FlameProxies gateway.
2. The gateway forwards the request to a residential IP.
3. That IP connects to the target website.
4. The response travels back the same way.

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What to expect by proxy type

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What affects latency in practice

• Distance. The further the exit IP is from the target’s servers, the longer each round trip takes. A request exiting in Brazil to a server in Germany will be slower than one exiting in Germany.
• Targeting precision. Narrow targeting, like a small city, leaves fewer IPs to choose from, and the gateway can’t always pick a fast one.
• New connections. Every new connection needs a TCP and TLS handshake through the proxy. Rotating on every request means paying that cost every time.
• Page weight. Large pages with images, video, and scripts take longer to transfer and use more bandwidth.
• The target. A slow or rate-limiting website is slow through any proxy.

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How to reduce latency

• Turn on fast mode. Add mode-fast to route through the peer with the lowest latency available. Fast mode doesn’t cost extra bandwidth.
  <USERNAME>-package-standard-country-us-mode-fast
  
• Try each pool. Sub-pools have different performance characteristics. Compare pool-1 and pool-2 against your target.
• Exit near the target. When location doesn’t matter for your data, target the country where the website’s servers are.
• Reuse connections for multi-step work. For flows that make several requests, use a sticky session and let your client keep the connection open, so you only pay the handshake once.
• Load less. In headless browsers, block images, fonts, and media you don’t need.
• Use static IPs for throughput. For large transfers to a fixed set of targets, static residential proxies are much faster and have unlimited bandwidth.

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How to measure

curl -x proxy.flameproxies.com:8989 -U "USERNAME-package-standard-country-us:PASSWORD" \
  -o /dev/null -s \
  -w "connect: %{time_connect}s  tls: %{time_appconnect}s  first byte: %{time_starttransfer}s  total: %{time_total}s\n" \
  https://ipinfo.io/json

• connect is the time to reach the gateway.
• tls is when the TLS handshake with the target finished, through the proxy.
• first byte is when the target started responding.
• total is the whole request.

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Next steps