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What Is Latency?

Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point on a network to another, usually measured in milliseconds as a round trip. Low latency means pages and API calls start responding quickly; high latency makes every request wait, however fast the connection is.

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how it works

How latency adds up

Light in optical fibre covers roughly 200 km per millisecond, so distance sets a floor: a round trip between New York and Los Angeles cannot take much less than 40 ms, and real routes are longer. On top of that come the hops through routers, queues on busy links and the time the server takes to respond.

A single web request needs several round trips before the first byte arrives: one for the TCP handshake, one for the TLS 1.3 handshake, then the request itself. That is why latency often matters more than bandwidth for small requests such as API calls and HTML pages.

  • 1

    Propagation

    What drives it
    Physical distance between hops
    What you can change
    Pick servers and proxies close to the target
  • 2

    Routing and queuing

    What drives it
    Number of hops, congestion
    What you can change
    Avoid detours through far-away gateways
  • 3

    Handshakes

    What drives it
    Round trips for TCP and TLS
    What you can change
    Reuse connections (keep-alive, HTTP/2)
  • 4

    Server time

    What drives it
    How fast the site responds
    What you can change
    Nothing, except asking less often
why it matters

Why latency matters for proxy users

A proxy adds a stop to every request: your machine to the proxy, then the proxy to the website. Total latency is the sum of both legs, so a proxy in the wrong place can double it.

Latency: what it means for you
  • Choose an exit close to the target site's servers when the location is up to you; choose the location you need when the content is geo-specific.
  • Static ISP proxies run on server hardware in data centres, so their latency is stable. Residential and mobile exits route through consumer devices and vary more.
  • Reuse connections. A client that opens a new TLS connection through the proxy for every request pays the handshake round trips each time.
  • Measure before you blame the proxy: run the same request with and without it, at the same time of day.
in practice

Measure latency through a proxy

curl can print how long each stage of a request took, which separates connection time from the server's own response time:

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Timing a request with curlShell
curl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT -o /dev/null -s \
  -w "connect: %{time_connect}s\ntls: %{time_appconnect}s\nfirst byte: %{time_starttransfer}s\ntotal: %{time_total}s\n" \
  https://example.com

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Guides from the blog

Setup guides and best practices from the CleanProxies blog.

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Related terms

Terms that come up alongside Latency.

All glossary terms

Latency FAQs

Straight answers about Latency.

It depends on distance and use. Under about 50 ms round trip feels instant for browsing and APIs within a region; video calls and games suffer above roughly 150 ms. Cross-continent requests can't go much below the distance floor.

Got more questions?All FAQs