Proxy Traffic

Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.decodo.com/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

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Viewing Traffic Usage

You can view your data usage in your dashboard under your selected proxy type → Statistics table. You can also filter the graph by individual proxy users and within preset or custom date ranges, among other options.

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Traffic Measurement

The total traffic data includes:

• Upload traffic. It’s the request data that includes all headers, cookies, and POST data.
• Download traffic. It’s every byte received from the target website, including response headers and cookies, even when request timeouts occur during the data transmission phase.
• 403 Forbidden, 404 Not Found, 503 Service Unavailable, and any other non-200 response returned by the target is counted towards total traffic.

Errors returned by our service rather than the target website, such as 502 or Connection Error responses, are not included.

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HTTPS traffic and TLS overhead

HTTPS requests have noticeably higher traffic volume compared to HTTP requests; this is especially evident when targeting smaller websites, such as APIs, which can return minimal data. This is due to the TLS overhead being large relative to the actual response payload. HTTPS requests include a TLS handshake that occurs between you and the target server through the proxy. As a result, the bytes tunneled through the proxy also count toward proxy traffic usage. Here is an example of the traffic difference when targeting an HTTPS website through an HTTP proxy via a simple cURL command:

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Calculating Request Size

The size of a request is the sum of the request header, request body, response header, response body, and cookies. To get an approximate size of the request, you can use online tools like this one to see the entire size of the site or its size by content types like HTML. For example, if you are using a scraper, based on the size of the site’s HTML, you can more or less see how much traffic a single request will use.

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Measuring Your Request Size in Practice

To understand what your data usage averages may be, you can check the size of the page depending on the tool:

• For browsers, Selenium, or any other tool that loads the webpage in full, you can check the size of your request in the Developer tools section with both Chrome and Firefox.

To do so, open a webpage and then open Developer Tools. Fully refresh the webpage using either CTRL+R for Windows or Command+R for macOS. The page size will be displayed in the Network tab at the bottom.

• For custom code solutions, a cURL request, or any other tool that loads only the backend of the webpage without any elements such as images, you can check the webpage size with the help of Pingdom Tools.

Enter your target webpage, and it will give you a good idea of how much data a single request typically contains on average.

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Limiting Traffic Usage

You can limit the traffic usage for each proxy user created.

1. To do so, visit your dashboard and select the Proxy setup page, depending on your proxy subscription type.
2. Then, click on Edit user to the right of your proxy user to set the limit.
3. You can enter the traffic limit (up to 1000000 GB) for each user individually and click on the checkmark to apply it.

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Reducing Traffic Usage

There are multiple ways you can reduce traffic consumption while using the proxies.

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Disabling Images

While using a browser, all loaded images and other website elements will account for your total data usage. When images are not necessary, you can disable them in both Chrome and Firefox by following the guidelines provided here.

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Loading Pages in Mobile Version

Some websites provide an alternative way for mobile users to access their page to consume less mobile data. While most websites provide a responsive design for mobile devices, others still have a separate mobile version. To check if your website supports the mobile layout, simply add an m. before the domain name in the URL field.

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Use Custom Solutions When Possible

No matter if you are purchasing sneakers, Amazon products, or creating new accounts for social media, try to look for custom solutions and bots when possible, as this will save you traffic data. Most of these solutions will request websites in a way that is the most data-efficient by calling them directly via cURL.

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Reaching Traffic Limit

Once you hit your monthly traffic limit, the proxy service will no longer be available. That means all proxy requests will return the 407 HTTP response code. If you’d like to keep using the proxies, you can purchase additional traffic according to your data rate or consider upgrading your plan.

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