Session behaviour is the first design decision after choosing a proxy type, and the one most often made by default. The two options fail in different ways.
What rotation fails at
Anything with state across requests. A cursor-based listing, a login or a basket tied to the visitor breaks when the address changes between steps. The signature is success on the first request of a flow and failure on the second.
What stickiness fails at
Concentration. Every request in the session comes from one address, so a rate limit on it stops the whole session. Residential addresses can also go offline mid-session, which a sticky session cannot hide.
How to choose
- Independent pages, many targets: rotate.
- Short multi-step flow, minutes: sticky for the length of the flow, then release.
- Long-lived account, days or weeks: a static address, as an ISP proxy provides.
- Unsure: run both on a sample and compare success per target, which is what the method page is for.
The guide on sessions and rotation covers how to build jobs that tolerate an address change either way.