Proxy is running slow

[#1]

I'm trying to get to the bottom of slow running proxies that we are using.  We're using the private proxies to connect to social media sites and the speed with and without the proxy is noticeably different - probably delays of 1 -2 seconds per page refresh with the proxy and near instant response without.

Before I go and shoot the provider of our private proxies, is there any reason that these proxies may be running slowly on the plusnet network?

This is the third provider we have tried and all are slow so don't want to bother changing again if it's down to something that Plusnet are doing!

[#2]

Proxy servers have their uses that amongst others involve cacheing content. So when a request comes in the cache needs to be searched only to find that the content doesn't exists (as it's dynamic so shouldn't) and the request forwarded on to the main host so this maybe the reason you are seeing delays regardless of the provider.

Just my 9.5p worth.

[#3]

We're using the proxies as we do confidential market research, so need to mask the IP addresses from which we are browsing.  

We're not trying to do anything around caching, just want to use different IP addresses for our outbound traffic.

I wondered if this was causing the Plusnet systems difficulties, which was slowing down our response time.  If this is not the case, that's great as I can then go after the provider of the proxies confident that they are the bottleneck!

[#4]

Well to be fair, that's a question I can't answer not using a Proxy, but there may be other users on here that use Proxies and may be able to provide you with more information.

Edit:- Corrected a typo.

[#5]

A lot of the responsiveness will depend on where the proxy is routing your traffic, are they local proxies or other countries?

[#6]

Yeah that's true.  These are all UK proxies.