How to Test SOCKS5 Proxy Speed and Success Rate

What to measure

• Time to First Byte (TTFB) — the true latency of the SOCKS5 handshake plus TLS setup
• Success rate — 200 responses divided by attempts on a canonical target
• Bandwidth — MB/s on a large-file download
• IP diversity — unique IPs across N sequential requests

Benchmark script (Python)

import time, requests
proxies = {"http": "socks5h://user:pass@gate.example.com:7777",
           "https": "socks5h://user:pass@gate.example.com:7777"}
target = "https://httpbin.org/get"
runs, successes, ttfbs, ips = 100, 0, [], set()
for _ in range(runs):
    try:
        t = time.time()
        r = requests.get(target, proxies=proxies, timeout=15)
        ttfbs.append(time.time() - t)
        if r.ok:
            successes += 1
            ips.add(r.json()["origin"])
    except Exception:
        pass
print(f"success={successes}/{runs}, avg_ttfb={sum(ttfbs)/len(ttfbs):.2f}s, unique_ips={len(ips)}")

Fair testing

• Test from the same VM at the same time of day
• Test against the SAME target (avoid CDN cache differences)
• Run at least 100 iterations
• Test with real workloads (Google SERPs, not httpbin) when the provider allows