Quality & errors · glossary

Success rate

Proxy success rate is the percentage of requests sent through a proxy that return a usable response from the destination, as opposed to a connection failure, a gateway error, a block or a challenge. Published figures are measured against specific targets and are not comparable across providers unless the methodology is; for your own workload, the meaningful number is the rate against your target, at your rate, with your client.

2 min read Updated

Errors & troubleshooting All terms

What lowers it#

CauseSymptomLever
Exit type mismatched with the target403, CAPTCHA on first requestMove to residential or mobile
Per-IP rate too high429, blocks after N requestsRotate more, slow down
Client fingerprintBlocks regardless of exitFix the client
Pool churnOccasional connection resetsRetry once; sticky sessions replace the exit
Target instabilityTimeouts and 5xx from the siteBack off; not a proxy problem

Measuring it honestly#

  • Count only responses whose content is valid, not just status 200 (soft blocks hide there).
  • Separate gateway errors from destination errors: the status codes tell you which side failed.
  • Measure per target and per exit type; a global number hides everything useful.

How it works at ProxShift#

ProxShift does not publish a single success-rate figure because it would describe a target, not the network; instead the error codes distinguish gateway from destination failures, and retries cost only the bytes they move.

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