Web scraping breaks first at the network edge. Before parsers, selectors, or pipelines get a chance, the connection either completes or it doesn’t.
That edge has changed: almost half of web traffic is automated, a substantial share is actively hostile to bots, and most sites speak modern HTTPS with tight timeouts and fingerprint checks.
If you do not measure proxies like you measure production services, you will spend your budget shipping retries and shards of HTML. [Read more…] about Stop guessing your proxy quality: A measurement playbook for reliable scraping