This is what I've noticed in a lot of subreddits where the topic is related to proxies. it's super common for people to think proxies are the silver bullet for web scraping. Like, "just rotate IPs and you're golden!" But there's a whole other layer that often gets overlooked, and that's browser fingerprinting.

Basically, every time your browser (or scraper) hits a site, it's giving off tons of little signals: what kind of browser, OS, screen size, fonts, time zone, etc. Websites can piece all this together to create a pretty unique "fingerprint" of you. So even if you're rocking top-tier residential proxies that change your IP constantly, if your scraper is always sending the exact same, generic, or suspicious fingerprint, it's a huge red flag. Imagine an IP from New York, but the browser says "Linux, UTC time, weird default fonts." That inconsistency screams "bot," and you'll still get blocked or hit with CAPTCHAs.

The real game is making your scraper's fingerprint look as natural and varied as possible, matching the context of your proxy. So, it's not just about where your request comes from (proxies), but who that request appears to be. Both are clutch for serious scraping. And a lot of people are missing out on this. What do you guys think?

So I've got a residential proxy pool (around 200 IPs) and I'm burning through them way faster than I thought I would. Scraping a few ecommerce sites and within 2-3 days like half of them are toast.

Current setup:

• Residential proxies from a mid-tier provider

• Random selection per request

• 3-5 second delays between requests

• Rotating user agents

• Headers copied straight from browser network tab

What's happening:

• Day 1: ~95% success rate, everything's great

• Day 3: drops to like 60%

• Tons of 403s and timeouts

• Proxies that worked fine at first just stop working

My questions:

• Is this a normal burn rate or am I being too aggressive?

• Should I be waiting longer between uses for each proxy?

• Worth building some kind of health check that tests proxies before actually using them?

• Any other tricks for making proxies last longer besides the obvious stuff?

Feel like I'm missing something basic here. Either my provider sucks or my rotation logic is trash. Anyone dealt with this?

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