Two unrelated things, to say the least, a mining proxy is a piece of software that acts as a local mining pool for the mining gears and acts as a single miner for the actual mining pool.
Basically, it's a piece of software that runs on Windows for example, and it has the following parameters that you need to enter.
- Pool URL (Viabtc, Kano, or whatever pool you use)
- Worker (worker for the same pool above)
- Pass (password for the same pool above)
- Port (for your miners to connect to).
And then when it's up and running, it will connect to the mining pool, the pool will treat it as an actual miner, and then on your actual miner's config page instead of entering the actual pool you use, the data will be like so
-Pool URL (The IP address of the machine that runs the mining proxy software, an example would be 192.168.1.2:9999)
-Worker (can be anything you chose)
-Pass (depends but usually x)
On the proxy status page, you will be able to see all your miners' shares as if it was a mining pool, on the pool, you will only see 1 miner which is whatever worker you set on the proxy, what is going to happen is your miners combined at the proxy will be submitting way too many shares, the pool's software will treat it as it's one giant super miner and will have to raise share difficulty to keep up a good pace.
Example: you have 50* S9, the pool wants you to be able to submit 10 shares per minute, so you will be submitting 500 shares per minute, let's say that will be 50 MB per minute.
When using a proxy, your miner could still submit 500 shares to the proxy, but the proxy will only submit 10 shares per minute to the actual pool (those 10 shares at current difficulty are worth exactly as much as those 500 shares at the lower difficulty), so now your network traffic on the WAN size is only 1MB per minute, so 50 miners connecting via a mining proxy will only consume as much data as a single miner.
When you have a somewhat pretty slow connection, connecting many miners will start to cause issues, reducing the number of connections to the pool to just 1 always helps, in fact, a mining proxy is a must when you go past a certain number of miners, it would be a nightmare having to route thousands of miners without a mining proxy.