ProxySwitcher's proxy scanner:
Maximizing Scanning Speed


Before you start reading this - I need to warn you that instructions here can potentially make your machine unbootable, and are intended for the advanced users only who understand what exactly they are doing in each step.

How Proxy Switcher operates

Now on to understanding what Proxy Switcher does to find working/anonymous/elite servers. First thing that gets done is fetching list of  web site addresses that contain public proxy lists. Then this list is used to download and parse actual proxy lists from all the listed web servers. Now comes in the actual scanning - Proxy Switcher has to go over all the proxy addresses that were retrieved and actually try to use them to determine are they any good.

This is where the scanning speed can become an issue since there are so many servers to check. Actually Proxy Switcher is built with real high speed scanning in mind. The reason why we usually have to scan only about 5-7 servers in parallel is thanks to the Microsoft. It has built in artificial connection throttling mechanism into some Windows operating systems (all Windows from XP SP2 to Vista x64 SP1). This limiter disables program from making connections if it tries to do it too fast.

 

Changing Scanner Options

Proxy Switcher's settings dialog This is the actual dialog where you can set proxy scanner options. Worker count option is what controls how many servers in parallel are checked during the scanning. The obvious way to speed up scanning is to increase worker count to an amount your internet connection can handle without getting timeouts.

Maximized scanner count Proxy Switcher is fairly smart - it tries to guess how many connections Windows will actually allow and sets maximal limit of the worker count accordingly. If you are certain it has made an error you can press the Increase Max Worker Count button to override default behaviour. Keep in mind that if you are wrong setting too high worker count will break scanning altogether.
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