Proxy Server Automatic Switching

 This article applies to registered Standard and PRO versions of the Proxy Switcher.

 Proxy Switcher has two automatic proxy switching modes:
  • Keep Alive
  • Auto Switching

Keep-Alive mode

Keep Alive mode works passively, it continuously checks currently active proxy server. If an error is returned Proxy Switcher will start looking for a working server in the folder named "ProxySwitcher". When such server is found an automatic proxy change will be performed.
This mode is most suited in cases where you have relatively small amount of personal proxy servers. For example in case you bought a list of private (password protected) proxy servers.

Auto Switching mode

Automatic proxy switching is based on an active proxy scanner, alive checker and switching timer. Which means that besides doing what Keep-Alive mode does Auto Switcher builds a queue of working proxy servers. This queue is continously filled and verified in the background.
If program finds that current proxy server has stopped responding to the requests an automatic switch will be made to one of the servers from the queue. Which means nearly instant switch to next server. Which in turn results in all the subsequent connections to be made via new proxy server. Last part of the system is a periodic switching timer which user can adjust. When timer triggers it will issue an automatic switching request. Timer can be set from 10 seconds to 30 minutes.

Troubleshooting Auto Switching

Sometimes the queue does not want to fill up at all. There are a few possible causes:
  1. There are no servers in the folders set as source folders for automatic switching.
  2. There are servers in source folders but they fail to be tested as working ones:
    1. Proxy servers are not working.
    2. You have changed test targets and as a result it's not working (there are few differences/bugs depending on the version you use.)
    3. Servers are not being tested as working due to some other reasons.
If you are using recent version of the program you can enable display of the scanning error messages in the auto-switching log. This will give you hints (error messages why the queue is not filling up).

Tuning

You can change the switching perefences from popup menu under the button "X". By default it prefers servers with faster response times. It can be changed to pure random, weighted random, random with preference of less used servers or sequential (alphabetic).
Only SSL servers option will force switching to pick only servers that support https:// connections. This option is enabled by default.

To issue an immediate switching request you can press on a button with an . Also a global hotkey can be set which when pressed will issue an immediate switching request. When such a switch is completed a balloon hint will be shown in the tray with the address and location of the new proxy server. This hotkey can be set from the program's preferences.