Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Does scraping the Texas TDLR licence lookup need a proxy?

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

No. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation licence search page returned the expected content on 10 of 10 unproxied requests from a plain cloud host (100%), and scored 100% on both datacenter configurations and both anti-detect configurations as well. Only the residential arm lost ground, at 70%. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/LicenseSearch/
Content assertion TDLR License Data Search
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% 541 ms 598 ms 187,590 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 100% 966 ms 4,870 ms 187,590 success 10
datacenter, rotating exit 100% 1,726 ms 4,634 ms 187,590 success 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 100% 980 ms 7,002 ms 187,590 success 10
anti-detect, rotating exit 100% 1,062 ms 5,020 ms 187,590 success 10
residential, rotating exit 70% 2,679 ms 6,498 ms 187,590 success 7, server error 3

What protects this target

Nothing. No challenge signature, no 403 and no soft block appeared on any of the 60 requests. The only failures in the run were three HTTP 502s on the residential arm.

The reason a plain HTTP client works here is worth stating, because it is not true of most state portals: TDLR's search page is fully server-rendered. The reconnaissance probe extracted 23,495 characters of text from it, the richest server-rendered body of any target in the study. There is no JavaScript shell to execute and nothing to wait for, so a rendered browser buys you nothing on this page.

At 187,590 bytes it is also the second-heaviest HTML page measured. One thousand fetches move about 0.19 GB.

robots.txt status

The URL measured is allowed by the host's robots.txt.
Status allowed
File https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note robots.txt 503 bytes via benchmark_ua

Limits of this result

  • The URL measured is TDLR's licence search page, not a result set or an individual licence record. A submitted search may be defended differently, and this result does not describe it.
  • 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_tx_tdlr_lookup,' raw.csv.

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