How to Reduce Proxy Latency to 50-100 ms: 7 Ways to Speed Up Connections for Advertising and Scraping

High proxy ping (latency) is a problem that directly affects performance speed: Facebook Ads and TikTok Ads accounts load in 10-15 seconds, marketplace scrapers collect data 3-5 times slower, and when managing dozens of accounts in an anti-detect browser, every second of delay turns into lost minutes. Latency (connection delay) is measured in milliseconds and indicates how long it takes for data to travel from your computer to the target server via the proxy and back.

In this article, we will discuss specific ways to reduce latency from typical 300-500 ms to comfortable 50-150 ms, which is critically important for arbitrage specialists, SMM professionals, and e-commerce sellers working with large volumes of data and multiple accounts.

Why Latency is Critical for Business Tasks

Connection delay directly affects the efficiency of work in various proxy usage scenarios. For arbitrage specialists working with Facebook Ads or TikTok Ads accounts, high ping means slow interface loading — instead of 2-3 seconds to open a campaign, it takes 10-15 seconds. When managing 20-50 ad accounts through an anti-detect browser like Dolphin Anty or AdsPower, these delays accumulate and turn one hour of work into three.

For SMM specialists managing dozens of client accounts on Instagram or TikTok, latency affects the speed of content publishing, responding to comments, and moderating messages. With a delay of 500 ms, every action — opening a profile, loading a feed, publishing a post — takes significantly longer. If you process 100-200 posts a day, the difference between 100 ms and 500 ms latency amounts to tens of minutes of lost time.

E-commerce sellers and price monitoring specialists face latency issues when scraping marketplaces — Wildberries, Ozon, Yandex.Market. A scraper making 1000 requests per hour, with 300 ms latency, spends 5 minutes waiting for responses. Reducing the delay to 100 ms saves 3-4 minutes for every thousand requests, which, at volumes of 10-20 thousand requests per day, results in an hour of saved work.

How to Properly Measure Proxy Latency

Before optimizing latency, you need to learn how to measure it correctly. A simple ping to the proxy server's IP address does not provide a complete picture, as it only shows the time to the provider's server but does not account for the delay on the route from the proxy to the target site (e.g., Facebook or Instagram).

The correct way to measure latency is to measure the time of a complete request cycle through the proxy to a real target resource. For Windows, you can use curl with the timing parameter:

curl -x http://username:password@proxy-server:port -o /dev/null -s -w "Time: %{time_total}s\n" https://www.facebook.com

This method shows the total page load time through the proxy. For business tasks, it is more important to measure latency to specific platforms you are working with. If you are an arbitrage specialist on Facebook Ads, measure the delay to facebook.com and business.facebook.com. If scraping Wildberries — to wildberries.ru.

In anti-detect browsers like Dolphin Anty or AdsPower, you can use built-in developer tools (F12 → Network) to view resource loading times. Pay attention to the "Waiting (TTFB)" parameter — this is the time to the first byte of the response, which is the practical latency for your task.

Choosing the Geographical Location of the Proxy

The geographical location of the proxy server is the first and most important factor affecting latency. The physical distance between your computer, the proxy server, and the target site directly determines the delay. Every 1000 km adds approximately 10-20 ms of latency due to the speed of signal propagation through fiber optics.

If you are in Moscow and working with Russian platforms (Wildberries, Ozon, VK), using a proxy from the USA or Europe will add 150-250 ms of delay just on the round trip. In this case, choosing a proxy from Moscow, St. Petersburg, or other cities in Russia will reduce latency to 20-80 ms.

When working with international platforms, consider the location of their servers. Facebook and Instagram host their main servers in the USA (California, Virginia) and Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt). If you are targeting an American audience and using US proxies, choose states on the East Coast (New York, New Jersey, Virginia) — they are closer to Facebook's main data centers, resulting in latency of 20-50 ms instead of 80-120 ms when using proxies from California.

For arbitrage specialists, it is important to understand that the choice of proxy location affects not only latency but also ad targeting. If you are driving traffic to the USA, use American proxies — this will reduce latency and make your activity more natural for Facebook's algorithms. When working with residential proxies, choose IP pools from the desired state or city for minimal delay and maximum trust.

Optimizing Connection Protocol

The choice of proxy protocol significantly affects latency. The main protocols — HTTP/HTTPS, SOCKS5, and SOCKS4 — differ in connection establishment speed and the amount of overhead data transmitted with each request.

The SOCKS5 protocol usually shows lower latency compared to HTTP proxies because it operates at a lower level of the network stack and does not add HTTP headers to each request. For tasks where speed is important — scraping, automation via Selenium, working with APIs — SOCKS5 provides a gain of 10-30 ms on each request.

HTTP/HTTPS proxies are more convenient for use in browsers and anti-detect browsers (Dolphin Anty, AdsPower, Multilogin) because they do not require additional configurations and are supported by all applications. However, they add overhead for processing HTTP headers, which increases latency by 15-40 ms compared to SOCKS5.

In Dolphin Anty or AdsPower, when setting up a profile, choose the protocol that your proxy provider supports with minimal delay. If both options are available, test the latency for your specific task — sometimes the difference is negligible, and the convenience of HTTP outweighs the 15-20 ms savings of SOCKS5.

Configuring DNS to Reduce Delays

DNS queries (converting a domain name to an IP address) add 20-200 ms to the first request to each new domain. When working with proxies, it is important to know where the DNS resolution occurs — on your computer, on the proxy server, or on the target server.

By default, in most configurations, the DNS query is made by your computer using your internet provider's DNS server. This adds latency, especially if the DNS server is slow or far away. Switching to fast public DNS servers reduces this delay.

For Windows, changing DNS is done through Control Panel → Network and Internet → Network and Sharing Center → Change adapter settings → Connection properties → IPv4 Protocol → Properties → Use the following DNS server addresses. Specify 1.1.1.1 as preferred and 8.8.8.8 as alternate.

An even more effective way is to use DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) or DNS-over-TLS, which encrypt DNS queries and often work faster than regular DNS. In Chrome, Firefox, and anti-detect browsers, you can enable DoH in the privacy settings. This adds encryption without a noticeable increase in latency.

When using SOCKS5 proxies, you can configure remote DNS resolution, where the DNS query is made by the proxy server instead of your computer. This is useful for privacy and can reduce latency if the proxy server is closer to the target DNS servers or uses a local cache.

Using Connection Pools and Keep-Alive

Each new TCP connection through a proxy requires a three-way handshake, which adds latency equal to one and a half RTT (round-trip time). If the latency to the proxy is 100 ms, establishing a new connection will add 150 ms of delay before sending the first byte of data.

HTTP keep-alive (persistent connections) allows reusing a single TCP connection for multiple HTTP requests. Instead of opening a new connection for each request, the browser or script sends all requests through the already established connection. This saves 150-300 ms on each subsequent request.

Modern browsers and anti-detect browsers (Dolphin Anty, AdsPower) automatically use keep-alive for HTTP connections. Make sure this option is not disabled in your proxy settings. For automation through scripts (Python requests, Node.js axios), use sessions that automatically maintain a connection pool.

Example of configuring keep-alive in Python for scraping through a proxy:

import requests

session = requests.Session()
session.proxies = {
    'http': 'http://user:pass@proxy:port',
    'https': 'http://user:pass@proxy:port'
}

# All requests through session use one connection
for url in urls:
    response = session.get(url)  # keep-alive automatically
    # data processing

For SOCKS5 proxies, the principle is the same — use libraries that support connection pools. In Node.js, the socks-proxy-agent library automatically manages connections when used with http.Agent or https.Agent with the keepAlive: true parameter.

Choosing the Right Proxy Type for the Task

The type of proxy directly affects latency due to differences in infrastructure and traffic routing methods. The three main types — residential, mobile, and data center proxies — show different latencies for the same geographical locations.

Data center proxies usually show the lowest latency — 10-80 ms for nearby locations. They are hosted in professional data centers with fast communication channels and direct peering with major networks. For tasks where speed is important and complete anonymity is not critical — scraping marketplaces, gathering analytics, price monitoring — data center proxies provide the optimal balance of speed and cost.

Residential proxies use IP addresses from real home internet connections, which adds latency due to less optimal routing and speed limitations of home plans. Typical latency for residential proxies is 80-250 ms. However, for working with Facebook Ads, Instagram, TikTok Ads, residential proxies are necessary to avoid bans, and the additional 50-100 ms of latency is an acceptable price for account security.

Mobile proxies show the highest latency — 150-500 ms, because traffic goes through mobile operator networks (4G/5G), which have greater delays compared to wired connections. Mobile networks add 50-150 ms of latency at the operator's infrastructure level. Mobile proxies are critical for farming mobile accounts on Instagram, TikTok, mobile applications, where high trust is more important than speed.

For arbitrage specialists working with dozens of ad accounts, a reasonable strategy is to use residential proxies for primary work in accounts (acceptable latency 100-200 ms) and data centers for auxiliary tasks like checking creatives or analytics (latency 30-60 ms). This optimizes the balance between work speed and account security.

Anti-Detect Browser Settings to Minimize Delays

Anti-detect browsers like Dolphin Anty, AdsPower, Multilogin, and GoLogin add their layer of traffic processing to spoof browser fingerprints, which can increase latency. Properly configuring these browsers can reduce overhead by 20-50 ms.

In Dolphin Anty, when creating a profile, disable unnecessary extensions and scripts that process each request. Each active extension adds 5-15 ms of delay to request processing. Leave only critical extensions for work — an ad blocker (if needed), password manager.

In the proxy settings of the profile, choose a direct connection to the proxy without additional chains. Some users configure proxy chains for additional anonymity — this adds the latency of each proxy in the chain. If you have 3 proxies in a chain, each with 100 ms, the total latency will be 300+ ms.

AdsPower allows you to configure network request parameters in the Advanced Settings section. Enable the "Fast mode" option if available — this disables some fingerprint checks that are not critical for most platforms but add 10-20 ms to each request.

In Multilogin, use the Mimic mode (Chrome emulation) instead of Stealthfox (Firefox emulation) for tasks where speed is important — Mimic shows 15-25% lower latency due to a more optimized Chromium engine. Stealthfox is better for tasks where deep anonymity is critical, but not speed.

Monitoring and Automatically Switching Slow Proxies

Proxy latency is not a constant value — it changes depending on server load, internet traffic routing, and time of day. A proxy that showed 80 ms in the morning may deliver 300 ms in the evening due to channel overload or routing through a longer path.

For business tasks that use dozens or hundreds of proxies, real-time latency monitoring is critically important. This allows for automatically disconnecting slow proxies and switching to fast ones, maintaining stable performance.

A simple monitoring method is to periodically ping target servers through each proxy and record the results. For automation, you can use Python scripts that check the latency of all proxies in your pool every 5-10 minutes and mark the slow ones (e.g., latency over 250 ms).

Example of a proxy latency monitoring script in Python:

import requests
import time

proxies_list = [
    {'http': 'http://user:pass@proxy1:port'},
    {'http': 'http://user:pass@proxy2:port'},
    # ... other proxies
]

def check_latency(proxy, url='https://www.facebook.com'):
    try:
        start = time.time()
        response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxy, timeout=10)
        latency = (time.time() - start) * 1000  # in milliseconds
        return latency if response.status_code == 200 else None
    except:
        return None

# Check each proxy
for proxy in proxies_list:
    latency = check_latency(proxy)
    if latency and latency < 250:
        print(f"Proxy OK: {latency:.0f} ms")
    else:
        print(f"Proxy slow or unavailable: {latency}")
        # Disable the proxy or send a notification

For work in anti-detect browsers, you can set up automatic profile rotation based on latency. If you are using the Dolphin Anty API or AdsPower API, the script can automatically switch profiles to fast proxies when the current proxy becomes slow.

Some proxy providers offer built-in latency monitoring tools in their personal account. Use this data to select optimal proxies from your pool. If the provider shows latency statistics by location, choose those that consistently show low values for your target platforms.

Conclusion

Reducing proxy latency from typical 300-500 ms to optimal 50-150 ms is achieved through a combination of measures: correctly choosing the geographical location of the proxy close to target servers, using fast protocols (SOCKS5 for scraping, HTTP for browsers), configuring fast DNS servers like Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), applying keep-alive connections for reusing TCP connections, choosing the right proxy type for the task (data centers for speed, residential for trust), and optimizing anti-detect browser settings.

For arbitrage specialists working with Facebook Ads and TikTok Ads, reducing latency by 200 ms saves 2-3 minutes on each check cycle of 30 accounts — that’s 10-15 minutes a day or 5-7 hours a month. For SMM specialists managing dozens of client Instagram profiles, low latency means a more responsive interface and the ability to process more accounts in a workday. E-commerce sellers benefit from faster scraping of marketplaces and up-to-date competitor pricing data.

If you work with ad accounts or multi-accounting in social networks, we recommend using residential proxies with low latency from geographically close locations — they provide a balance between work speed (100-200 ms) and high platform trust, minimizing the risk of bans while maintaining a comfortable loading speed for interfaces.