Sticky session
Also called: session persistence, sticky IP
A sticky session keeps a proxy connection on the same exit IP for a set duration — commonly ten to sixty minutes — instead of rotating on every request. It is the setting that lets a rotating residential pool behave like a fixed address for as long as a task takes.
Rotating pools change exit address constantly, which is right for scraping and wrong for anything logged in. A sticky session pins a session identifier to one address for a chosen window, so a sequence of actions appears to come from one place.
Why an account needs it
Logging in from Frankfurt, loading a page from São Paulo and posting from Singapore inside four minutes is not a plausible sequence for any human. An account that changes IP mid-session looks worse than one that never moves at all — rotation without stickiness actively creates the anomaly it was meant to avoid.
Choosing a duration
Match the window to the task. A login and a handful of actions may need ten minutes; a warm-up session running for an hour needs the full hour, or a static ISP proxy instead. Note that stickiness is best-effort on residential pools: the underlying device can drop offline before the window ends, and the provider will hand you a new address.
For accounts meant to live in one place indefinitely, stop managing sessions and buy a static address. It costs more per month and removes an entire class of failure.