What is Latency?

A proxied request makes two hops instead of one — you to the proxy, proxy to the target — so some added delay is unavoidable. How much depends on the route: a datacenter or ISP proxy sitting on a backbone connection adds very little, while a residential IP inherits whatever the consumer line and its upstream can manage.

Geography dominates everything else. An exit node on the wrong continent from the target adds hundreds of milliseconds that no amount of provider optimisation can recover, which is why matching the exit location to the target's servers matters more than the advertised average.

For bulk collection, latency is largely hidden by running requests concurrently. For time-critical work such as limited drops or live pricing, it is the entire game.