Rotating vs sticky sessions

Rotating: a new IP per connection

A login without a -sid- key is rotating. The gateway picks a new exit for every new connection it receives: each CONNECT tunnel, each plain HTTP request, each SOCKS5 connection and each UDP association.

# three connections, three exit IPs
for i in 1 2 3; do
  curl -s -x gate.aeonproxy.com:7000 -U "LOGIN-cc-us:PASSWORD" https://api.ipify.org; echo
done

The exit changes per connection, not per request. Clients keep connections open when they can: a browser, a requests.Session or an HTTP/2 client sends many HTTPS requests through one tunnel, and all of them leave from the same IP. Plain http:// requests are different, because the gateway serves one of them per connection and each one gets its own exit. For a new IP on every HTTPS request, open a new connection for each request. The HTTP proxies guide shows both cases in a test.

Sticky: one IP per session key

Add -sid- with a key of your choice, 1–32 letters and digits, and -ttl- with the minutes to keep the IP, 1–60. Without -ttl- the session lasts 10 minutes, and a number above 60 counts as 60. -ttl- without -sid- does nothing: the login stays rotating. Every connection whose login carries the same key leaves from one exit until the time runs out. A new key means a new IP.

LOGIN-cc-gb-sid-shop1-ttl-30      # one UK IP for 30 minutes
LOGIN-cc-gb-sid-shop2-ttl-30      # a second UK IP, kept apart from shop1

The gateway keeps one session per login, key and targeting. Change any of them and you get a different session with a different IP:

• The login. A sub-user has its own, so -sid-shop1 on a sub-user is not the same session as -sid-shop1 on your main login.
• The key after -sid-. Keys are case-sensitive: Shop1 and shop1 are two sessions.
• The targeting: -cc-, -st-, -city-, -isp- and -car-. The same key with another city is another session.

The port is not part of it: the same login on port 7000 and on port 7001 asks for the same session, which lets TCP and UDP traffic share one exit (SOCKS5 and UDP).

How long a sticky IP lasts

Up to ttl minutes. When the time is up, the next connection with the same key gets a new IP with the same targeting. Residential and mobile exits are real home connections and phones: when a router restarts or a phone loses signal, the session moves to a new IP before its time is up. Plan jobs so that an IP change halfway does no harm: keep each task shorter than its session, and retry a dropped connection.

Which one to use

Many sticky sessions at once

The generator on the Residential and Mobile pages writes up to 500 lines with a fresh 8-character key on each, so every line is its own IP. Set Session to Sticky, then raise Session time: it starts at 1 minute, which is short for most jobs. From code, the proxy list API returns the same lines.

Bought traffic has no thread limit, so hundreds of sessions can run side by side. A sticky session costs the same as a rotating one: traffic is counted in GB, both directions, whatever the session type.