We often see HTTP agents talk about the IP network delay, for example, our Qingguo Network: IP network delay <100ms.
Yes, as you can imagine, using an HTTP proxy can sometimes slow down your network. Why is this?
This starts with how HTTP proxies work.
When we use an HTTP proxy, the network request is not sent directly to the target server, but to the proxy server first. Then, the proxy server helps us send the request to the target server. This extra intermediate step is what slows down the network.
Having said that, many people don't understand, what is an additional intermediate step? There are several aspects involved here.
First of all, the location and performance of the proxy server is one of the important factors affecting the latency. If the proxy server is far away from us, the time it takes for data to travel between the proxy server and the destination server increases, and the latency goes up.
Another important factor is network load. Just like driving during rush hour, a proxy server can get a little "tiring" if it has a lot of requests being processed at the same time. This causes requests to be queued for processing, which increases latency.
Also, encrypting and decrypting data adds some latency. If our HTTP proxy uses SSL or TLS to protect the transmitted data, then the data needs to be encrypted and decrypted when passing through the proxy server. This encryption and decryption process will consume some time and add some delay.
If it is in the middle, this is the so-called "intermediate step", each step will increase our delay, if any step increases the delay very high, then the overall delay will not be low.