What Is a Sticky Session?

How sticky sessions work

Most pool products give you one gateway address. Each new connection to it is matched to an exit IP from the provider's network. Without extra instructions, the provider may pick a different exit every time.

A sticky session adds an instruction: keep everything with this label on one exit. The label is a session ID you choose, written into the proxy username. Bright Data's IP rotation documentation puts it plainly: requests carrying the same -session value are forwarded to the same proxy IP, and changing the value gets you a new one. Oxylabs and Decodo work the same way with their own parameter names.

Three things end a sticky session:

• The timer. The provider's default or the duration you set.
• Idle time. No requests for a while and the provider releases the exit.
• The exit disappearing. On residential and mobile pools the exit is a real device on someone's connection. When it goes offline the provider either moves you to a new IP silently or fails the request.

The term means something else in web hosting. On a load balancer, a sticky session keeps one visitor on the same backend server, usually with a cookie; AWS documents this for Application Load Balancers. Same idea, different layer: one keeps a server, the other keeps an exit IP.

Typical durations

Session limits come from each provider's documentation. These were read on October 30, 2026; check the linked page before you build on a number.

• Oxylabs. Its session control page says a session lasts 10 minutes by default, or ends after 60 seconds without requests, whichever comes first. The sesstime parameter extends it up to 1440 minutes. With sessid, a dropped exit is replaced automatically; with sessid_oneip, the request fails with a 502 instead.
• Bright Data. The rotation page gives a 5-minute idle time: if more than 5 minutes pass between requests, the next one gets a random IP even with the same session value. Session IDs must be alphanumeric.
• Decodo. Its session types page offers 1, 10, 30 or 60 minutes from the dashboard and any whole number of minutes from 1 to 1440 through sessionduration. It notes that the longer the session, the higher the chance it ends early, because the residential device behind it goes offline.

A useful reading of these numbers: the idle limit matters more than the maximum. A script that pauses for six minutes between steps loses a Bright Data session long before any 24-hour ceiling.

Dedicated line vs pool session

A pool session borrows an exit for a while. A dedicated line is the exit.

On a Coronium line, one physical device with its own SIM is rented to one customer. You connect to that line's own host and ports, over HTTP or SOCKS5. There is no session ID to manage and no idle timer: the carrier IP stays the same until you change it with the dashboard button, an API call, the rotation link or a timer you set, with at least 60 seconds between rotations. Some device types rotate on request only, and Brazil lines have no timer.

Two cautions that pool users rarely meet:

• The rotation link rotates on every GET request, including link previews. Do not paste it into chat apps or documents that fetch previews, or the IP will change when someone views the message.
• The carrier can still change the IP. Mobile networks reassign addresses when a device reconnects. A dedicated line is steady in normal operation, not frozen.

For longer account work, that difference is the point. A pool session of 30 minutes that may end early suits a checkout; a line that keeps its IP for days suits an account you log in to every morning.

Check that your session holds

Before trusting any session setting, measure it. This loop prints the exit IP once a minute for five minutes:

PROXY='http://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT'
for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do
  printf '%s ' "$(date +%T)"
  curl -s -x "$PROXY" https://api.ipify.org
  echo
  sleep 60
done

The same address on every line means the session held. A change tells you the timer, the idle limit or the exit ended it. Run it once with your normal gap between requests: if your real job pauses for longer than the provider's idle limit, this is where you will see it.

If the password contains characters such as @ or :, percent-encode them in the URL; the proxy formats guide shows how. The commands on this page were run with curl 8.7.1 against a local test proxy.

When to use a sticky session

Keep one IP when the site connects your requests to each other:

• Logging in, then working inside the account.
• Carts, checkouts and payment steps.
• Multi-page forms and sign-up flows.
• Anything with a session cookie that the site checks against the IP.

Rotate when each request stands alone:

• Collecting public pages with no login.
• Spreading many small requests across addresses.
• Checking how a page looks from several locations.

If you need both, run two setups: a steady line for account work and rotation for collection. Mixing them on one account, so that it appears from a new IP every few minutes, is the pattern most sites read as automation.

Frequently asked questions