Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Does the California DCA licence search need a proxy?

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

No, and adding a proxy measurably hurt. The California Department of Consumer Affairs licence search returned the expected content on 10 of 10 unproxied requests (100%); the four datacenter and anti-detect configurations scored 90%, 80%, 80% and 70% respectively. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://search.dca.ca.gov/
Content assertion Search - DCA
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% 984 ms 1,399 ms 47,717 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 90% 913 ms 1,772 ms 47,717 success 9, blocked 1
datacenter, rotating exit 80% 1,318 ms 4,313 ms 47,717 success 8, blocked 2
anti-detect, one pinned exit 80% 1,330 ms 1,818 ms 47,717 success 8, blocked 2
anti-detect, rotating exit 70% 1,109 ms 3,031 ms 47,717 success 7, blocked 3
residential, rotating exit 100% 2,568 ms 3,315 ms 47,717 success 10

What protects this target

HTTP 403, and only for proxied traffic. Eight of 60 requests were refused; every one of them was on a datacenter or anti-detect arm, and neither the unproxied arm nor the residential arm drew a single 403.

The shape of that is the useful part. The refusals rise as the tier climbs -- 90% on a pinned datacenter exit, 80% rotating, 80% and 70% with a browser fingerprint attached — so the fingerprint did not help and the rotation did not help. Residential exits were served normally (100%), which points at the exit network rather than at the client signature. This run cannot separate ASN reputation from exit geography as the cause, and does not claim to.

The practical reading is blunt: on this target the correct configuration is the one you already have, and the four intermediate tiers each cost you between ten and thirty points of pass rate for nothing.

robots.txt status

The URL measured is allowed by the host's robots.txt.
Status allowed
File https://search.dca.ca.gov/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note robots.txt 54 bytes via benchmark_ua

Limits of this result

  • The search application's landing page was measured, not a submitted licence query.
  • 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_ca_dca_lookup,' raw.csv.

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