Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Does the Alabama Board of Medical Examiners site need a proxy?

Professional licensing boards · minimum viable tier: no proxy needed · measured 2026-08-18

Not for the page that was measured, and that page is not the licence lookup. albme.gov/ returned the expected content on 10 of 10 unproxied requests (100%) and on all six configurations except residential, which scored 90%. The intended target — the ALBME licensee lookup — was never measured, for the reason below. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://www.albme.gov/
Content assertion Alabama Board of Medical Examiners
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% 383 ms 414 ms 30,493 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 100% 782 ms 2,026 ms 30,493 success 10
datacenter, rotating exit 100% 802 ms 2,078 ms 30,493 success 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 100% 969 ms 2,084 ms 30,493 success 10
anti-detect, rotating exit 100% 859 ms 2,134 ms 30,493 success 10
residential, rotating exit 90% 2,074 ms 5,300 ms 30,493 success 9, server error 1

What protects this target

Nothing, on the homepage. No challenge signature on any of the 60 requests; the single failure was one HTTP 502 on the residential arm.

What was actually measured. The target list's original URL was albme.gov/resources/licensees/license-lookup/. The reconnaissance probe found it returns HTTP 404 with the board's own "page not found" template, so the site root was substituted before the run. The root is a content-managed homepage: static, edge-cacheable, and nothing like a licence query in what it asks of the server.

That distinction is the single most important lesson in this study. PROTECTION-CENSUS.md was written because the preceding dry run scored four of five targets "no proxy needed" after fetching landing pages, and registry protection lives on the search endpoint. A 100% pass rate on albme.gov/ is a fact about albme.gov/, and it is not evidence that the Alabama licensee lookup can be collected without a proxy.

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://www.albme.gov/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note no robots.txt (HTTP 404)

Limits of this result

  • The URL measured is the board's homepage. The licensee lookup path in the target list returns HTTP 404 and no working lookup URL was measured, so this result says nothing about licence data collection.
  • 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 '^[^,]*,us_al_medical,' raw.csv.

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