“How fast is a proxy?” is one of the most-asked questions and one of the most misunderstood. The answer depends on which kind of “fast” you mean: latency (how long one round trip takes) or throughput (how much data per second the connection carries). For clicking around and reading pages, latency dominates what you feel; for video, both matter. This page explains what determines proxy speed, shows one real measurement, and gives a debug order for slow sessions.
Latency vs throughput
Both are network performance measures, but they measure different things:
Latency is the time for one round trip: a packet from your device to a server and the answer back, measured in milliseconds. It grows with distance. Light in optical fibre covers roughly 200,000 km per second, so every 1,000 km of cable adds roughly 10 ms to a round trip before any routing or processing.
Throughput (often called bandwidth) is how much data the connection carries per second, measured in Mbps.
A web page needs many round trips: DNS, the TLS handshake, the HTML, then scripts, styles and images. That is why a connection with plenty of bandwidth but a long round trip still feels slow when you click. For video, throughput sets the quality you can sustain, and latency affects how quickly the player recovers when it needs more data.
What the proxy hop actually costs
With a web proxy, every request travels two legs:
- Without proxy: browser → destination.
- With proxy: browser → proxy region, then proxy region → destination.
The extra cost depends on where you, the proxy region and the destination site sit. If the region is close to you and the site is well connected to the region, the extra leg costs little. If the region is on another continent, every one of the page’s round trips pays for that distance.
A real measurement: India, 15 October 2026
We timed this instead of quoting typical numbers. On 15 October 2026, from a test machine in India, each run used a fresh browser, opened en.wikipedia.org through AnyProxy, and stopped the timer when the proxied page finished loading. We did four runs per region, interleaved, and compared them with loading Wikipedia directly.
| Route | Median of 4 runs | Individual runs (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| Direct, no proxy | 1.15 s | 1153, 3461, 1150, 942 |
| AnyProxy Singapore | 1.41 s | 2577, 1480, 1334, 1310 |
| AnyProxy Frankfurt | 2.42 s | 2392, 2213, 2455, 3424 |
| AnyProxy Virginia | 3.65 s | 3029, 3558, 3748, 3898 |
What it shows:
- The nearest region cost about a quarter of a second over a direct load.
- The farthest region took roughly three times as long as direct, on the same connection. Bandwidth did not change; distance did.
- The first visit to a region was slower (2.6 s in Singapore) than later ones.
- A site behind a Cloudflare check can add a few seconds on the first visit while AnyProxy completes the check.
This is one location, one site and one evening, not a benchmark. Your numbers depend on where you are and which site you open. The How fast is it? FAQ has the same data.
Why region matters more than bandwidth
What decides proxy speed for you:
Distance from you to the region. It sets the cost of the first leg, paid on every round trip.
The path between the region and the destination site. Big sites have servers in many places; a small site hosted on one continent is fastest from a region on that continent.
Load on the region at that moment. Busy hours can slow any shared server.
AnyProxy has three free regions: Singapore, Frankfurt and Virginia. Pro adds Tokyo and Los Angeles. São Paulo is listed as coming soon.
How to diagnose a slow proxy session
If pages load slowly through the proxy, work through this order:
Step 1: Check the region picker. AnyProxy’s region picker shows a live ping in milliseconds for each region from your browser and suggests the nearest one. If the region you are on shows a much higher number than another, switch.
Step 2: Test the destination directly if you can reach it from any network. If the site is slow without the proxy, the proxy is not the bottleneck.
Step 3: Try a clean window. Extensions and busy background tabs compete for the connection. A private window disables most extensions.
Step 4: Compare networks. If the proxy is fine on mobile data but slow on your Wi-Fi, the Wi-Fi or its filter is the bottleneck.
Step 5: Decide whether it is latency or bandwidth. Latency problem: every click has a visible delay, even small pages. Bandwidth problem: pages eventually load, but video buffers and large downloads crawl.
Step 6: Accept what a web proxy cannot fix. Some delay is the second leg itself. Some sites are heavy, and some show their own checks or captchas to proxy addresses (Google Search did in our tests on 15 Oct 2026). A different region sometimes helps; a paid plan does not change these.
Detailed troubleshooting: /help/how-to-fix-proxy-not-loading/, /help/how-to-fix-youtube-buffering-in-proxy/.
Region choice by your location
We have measured only from India, so this is a method rather than a table of numbers:
- Pick the region physically closest to you. For South and Southeast Asia that is usually Singapore; for Europe, the Middle East and much of Africa, Frankfurt; for the Americas, Virginia. Pro users near Japan or the US West Coast can use Tokyo or Los Angeles.
- Read the live ping in the picker. It is measured from your own connection at that moment, which beats any published table.
- If a site behaves differently by country, choose the closest region where the site is available. Sites see the region’s country, not yours: Frankfurt, for example, brings EU cookie-consent screens on Google, YouTube and others.
What Pro does and does not change
Pro costs $4.99 a month or $39 a year. It removes ads from AnyProxy’s own pages, adds the Tokyo and Los Angeles servers, and includes priority email support. Free and Pro use the same engine. Pro does not make a given region faster, and it has no separate video-quality tier: video quality is whatever the site’s own player picks for the connection it sees.
If one of the Pro regions is much closer to you than Singapore, Frankfurt or Virginia, that distance is the speed benefit. If not, Free behaves the same.
Scraping and automation
Heavy scraping and automated tools are outside the browser-proxy use case. AnyProxy offers a separate Scraper API for programmatic access.
The one-page summary
Speed is dominated by distance: pick the nearest region first. In our India measurement the nearest region added about 0.26 s to a Wikipedia load and the farthest tripled it. If the proxy feels slow, check the live ping and switch region, then test the site directly, then compare networks. Upgrading only helps if a Pro region is closer to you.