The time a request takes to complete depends mostly on the website you’re scraping. Sites with strong bot-detection systems usually take longer, since IPRoyal needs to process it before returning the content. In rare cases, a request can take up to 75 seconds.
Before you get a response, IPRoyal:
Loads the target through a proxy
Handles bot-detection challenges
Renders the page when needed
Retries some temporary failures once
While each step happens on IPRoyal’s side, it does add time compared with a direct request to the website.
What you can do:
Set your client timeout to at least 90 seconds. If your client times out earlier, the request can still finish on IPRoyal’s side and use a credit.
Wait for the response before retrying. A slow request is still running. Sending the same request again doesn’t speed it up and can lead to duplicate results.
Run requests in parallel. If you need to scrape many pages, send several requests at the same time instead of one after another. Stay within your concurrency limit, which you can check with the User endpoint (GET /v1/user).
If requests to one target are always slow, contact IPRoyal Support and include the ‘job_id’ value from the response. Our team can trace any request by its ‘job_id’ value.
Note: The ‘job_id’ value is only included in API responses. It doesn’t appear in the dashboard, so save it in your logs whenever you send requests from your own setup.
Learn more about response times and timeouts in our Web Scraper API documentation.