The short answer
A thread here means one request in flight. If your plan allows 100 threads, you can have 100 requests running at the same moment; the 101st waits or fails.
How many do you need?
Throughput is roughly threads divided by average response time. 50 threads at 2 seconds per page is about 25 pages per second, or 90,000 an hour. Most jobs need far fewer threads than people buy, and too many threads on too few IPs triggers rate limits.
Also known as
Concurrency, concurrent connections, parallel requests, simultaneous sessions.
Learn more
- Rayobyte concurrency and threads
- Webshare bandwidth and threads
- How big should your proxy pool be?
- What is rate limiting?
- RFC 9293, TCP connections
- Scrapy downloader middleware and concurrency
- Node.js documentation
- RFC 6585, the 429 status code
Affiliate disclosure: Team of Monkeys is an affiliate of Geonode, Webshare and Rayobyte. Links and banners marked as sponsored, and links to Geonode, Webshare and Rayobyte in the text, use our referral links, and we may earn a commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. Our explanations and comparisons are written to be useful whichever provider you choose.
Editorial note: Proxy providers change their pools, features and prices often, so treat any figures here as typical ranges at the time of writing and confirm current terms with the provider before you buy.
Editorial note: Proxy providers change their pools, features and prices often, so treat any figures here as typical ranges at the time of writing and confirm current terms with the provider before you buy.