Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Do you need a proxy for the EPFO India member portal?

International registries · minimum viable tier: no proxy needed · measured 2026-08-18

No, and the most expensive tier was the only one that could not reach it at all. The EPFO unified member portal returned the expected content on 10 of 10 unproxied requests (100%), and on both datacenter configurations and anti-detect on a pinned exit. The residential arm scored 0% — ten HTTP 502s and no successes. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in/memberinterface/
Content assertion Provident Fund
Arms 6
Rounds per arm 10
Requests 60
Measured 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC
Benchmark host DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3)

A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.

This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.

Results by arm

Arm Success p50 p95 Bytes per success Outcomes
direct (no proxy) 100% 1,442 ms 16,207 ms 51,828 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 100% 1,502 ms 7,458 ms 51,828 success 10
datacenter, rotating exit 100% 1,694 ms 2,442 ms 51,828 success 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 100% 2,817 ms 3,865 ms 51,828 success 10
anti-detect, rotating exit 80% 2,527 ms 30,112 ms 51,825 success 8, error 2
residential, rotating exit 0% 1,332 ms 1,382 ms n/a server error 10

What protects this target

Nothing on the target's side. No challenge signature was recorded on any arm, and the requests that failed did not fail at the portal.

The residential arm's ten HTTP 502 responses came back with a median of 1,332 ms — they failed fast, which places the fault on the proxy hop rather than on a portal half a world away timing out. This is the only target in the study where an entire arm returned nothing but 502s. Residential routing on the rotating proxy had shipped on 2026-08-17, the day before the run, so this is the baseline of a two-day-old integration, not a verdict on the portal.

Distance shows up in the unproxied numbers too: a median of 1,442 ms but a 95th percentile of 16,207 ms from a New York datacenter, the widest direct-arm spread of any target in the run.

robots.txt status

The host serves no robots.txt — the request returns HTTP 404. Nothing is disallowed, and nothing is granted either.
Status allowed
File https://unifiedportal-mem.epfindia.gov.in/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note no robots.txt (HTTP 404)

Limits of this result

  • Residential routing was two days old at measurement time. Its result here measures a new integration, not the residential tier.
  • The member interface root was measured, not an authenticated member lookup, which requires a login and was out of scope.
  • Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
  • One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
  • The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.

Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets

The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,in_epfindia,' raw.csv.

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