Routing Strategies

Distribute requests across proxy pools using different routing strategies.

Octoprox supports multiple routing strategies for distributing requests across proxy pools:

Strategy	Description
`round_robin`	Distributes requests evenly across all healthy proxies in order
`least_used`	Routes to the proxy with the fewest active connections
`random`	Randomly selects a healthy proxy for each request
`sticky`	Routes requests from the same client to the same proxy
`health_based`	Prioritizes proxies with better health scores and lower latency

Session IDs

When using the sticky routing strategy, you can control session affinity by embedding a session ID in the proxy authentication username. This allows you to group requests under a specific session, ensuring they are all routed to the same upstream proxy.

Format: <username>-sessid-<session_id>

Examples:

# Without session ID — uses client IP for session affinity
Proxy-Authorization: Basic base64(myuser:password)

# With session ID — uses "order-123" for session affinity
Proxy-Authorization: Basic base64(myuser-sessid-order-123:password)

# Hyphenated username works too
Proxy-Authorization: Basic base64(my-project-sessid-abc456:password)

Behavior:

The -sessid- delimiter separates the real username from the session ID. The password remains unchanged.
When a session ID is provided, it replaces the client IP as the session identifier for the sticky strategy.
If the upstream proxy assigned to a session becomes unhealthy (e.g., IP rotation), a new proxy is automatically assigned on the next request.
Without a session ID, the sticky strategy falls back to using the client IP address, which is the default behavior.
This feature only takes effect when the project’s routing strategy is set to sticky. Other strategies ignore the session ID.

Note: The string -sessid- is a reserved delimiter and should not appear in your project username.