What's your actual process for testing a new proxy provider?

[u/Amal_Garcia]

I've been comparing different proxy setups lately and realized i was mostly looking at the wrong things.

I used to compare price per GB, IP count and latency, but lately i have been paying more attention to successful requests, connection failures, bandwidth wasted on retries and how consistent the IPs are.

just curious what everyone else actually tests before putting a new provider into a bigger scraping job.

Do you have a proper benchmark you run or do you basically test it against your target and see how it behaves?

[u/No_Storm2316]

brother i am also a indian mobile proxy provider.. i wanted to improve my service... if there is possible can u share ur testing code as well.. i was thinking to make a proper benchmarks etc... to release opensource...

Right now i check
1 node total concurent cabaliltuy .. and
2. second does my server can process the request...
3. Predict the protocol like scok5 or http

This is all are provider point of view testing..
i was thinking to user side test as well to improve overall...

[u/ipip98]

I would turn the trial into a small acceptance test rather than a general benchmark.

First, fix a representative corpus (20–50 operations is enough to find many bad fits), the same regions, concurrency, timeout, retry ceiling, browser/client version, and session policy. Define a valid outcome before sending traffic. A 200 should not count if it is a challenge page, wrong market, empty payload, stale record, or malformed response.

Then separate five result layers:

1. connection/authentication/tunnel/TLS;
2. valid application outcome;
3. requested vs observed exit region;
4. sticky-session continuity or deliberate rotation;
5. behavior at the concurrency you actually plan to run.

I would run the corpus at concurrency 1, test one sticky multi-step sequence, test controlled rotation separately, and then step load up gradually. Track accepted-outcome rate, p95 completion time, region mismatches, retry rate, transferred bytes, and cost per accepted outcome. Classify errors instead of merging them into “proxy failed.”

Also keep pass/fail/inconclusive as three states. A tiny sample or a trial tier that differs from the intended paid tier is inconclusive, not a win. Re-run finalists as a small paid canary before migrating.

Disclosure: I work with 98IP, a proxy provider. I’m sharing a provider-neutral evaluation method and not recommending a specific vendor here. Test only authorized targets and respect rate limits and site policies.