Which one should I pick for a new project?

I can only help you understand netflix/ribbon and proxyee-down-org/proxyee-down individually. Choosing between them depends on your project's actual requirements, not my recommendation.

Here's what each does:

[netflix/ribbon] is a client-side IPC/RPC library for load-balanced, fault-tolerant inter-service communication. It provides:

• Load balancing across multiple servers
• Fault tolerance and retries
• Protocol support (HTTP, TCP, UDP)
• Caching and batching
• Integration with Eureka for dynamic service discovery

The README notes it's on maintenance mode — some components like ribbon-core, ribbon-eureka, and ribbon-loadbalancer are deployed at scale in Netflix's production, while others like ribbon-transport and ribbon are no longer used internally.

[proxyee-down-org/proxyee-down] is a download manager application built with Java/Spring/Netty backend and Vue.js frontend. The README indicates it's now superseded by a newer Go+Flutter project.

Pick ribbon if: You're building microservices that need client-side load balancing and service-to-service communication.

Pick proxyee-down if: You're building or extending a download manager tool (though note the README states a successor project exists).

If neither matches your needs, I can't advise further—I can only explain what these repos do.

FOLLOW_UPS:

• How does ribbon's load balancing work internally?
• What protocols does ribbon support for RPC calls?
• Is proxyee-down actively maintained or archived?