Proxy Bandwidth Optimization: Cut Costs Without Sacrificing Performance

Residential and mobile proxy bandwidth is expensive — $5-50 per GB. Every wasted byte is wasted money. Here are practical techniques to dramatically reduce your proxy bandwidth consumption. Where Bandwidth Gets Wasted 1. Downloading Full Pages When You Need One Data Point A typical web page is 2-5 MB. If you only need a price or title, you are wasting 99% of the bandwidth on images, CSS, JavaScript, and ads. 2. Loading Resources You Do Not Need Images, videos, fonts, tracking scripts, and ads consume the bulk of page weight but are rarely needed for data extraction. 3. Redundant Requests Scraping the same page multiple times because of poor caching or retry logic. 4. Failed Requests Requests that fail (403, CAPTCHA, timeout) still consume bandwidth. Optimization Techniques 1. Block Unnecessary Resources In Playwright or Puppeteer, intercept and block heavy resources: from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright def create_optimized_page ( browser ): page = browser . new_page () # Bl