AWS Olympics: Speed-Testing EC2 and S3 Across Regions

AWS Olympics: Speed-Testing EC2 and S3 Across Regions(blog.takipi.com)

55 points by chookrl 13 years ago | 15 comments

dbarlett 13 years ago |

For anyone interested in optimizing S3 performance, I recommend Jim Sorenson's "Building Scalable Applications on Amazon S3" from re:Invent.

http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/building-scalabl...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYnVRYbUR6A

nachteilig 13 years ago | |

His comments on hashing for S3 buckets were pretty interesting.

res0nat0r 13 years ago | | |

Here's a very informative blog post by Doug Grismore that talks more about this if you are interested: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/03/amazon-s3-performance-tip...

cpa 13 years ago |

Any idea why the results are not symmetrical? Upload from Virginia to California is twice as fast as from California to Viriginia (and it's even worse with US <-> Japan).

Are there strategical interests to not have a symmetric link?

datasage 13 years ago | |

Actually, the results are reverse from what you said (y-axis is the origin). It likely has to do with traffic congestion coming out of each datacenter. Virginia has by far the heaviest use out of all the datacenters.

Xylakant 13 years ago | |

Maybe the link is symmetric, but the traffic flow is not - so in one direction the intertubes are more clogged.

toki5 13 years ago |

You know, I know it's 2013 and all, and things like this shouldn't amaze me, but the fact that you can get data from Australia to Brazil in _minutes_ is still kind of astounding to me.

datasage 13 years ago |

Australia is has low bandwidth to the rest of the world largely due its geography and capacity/path of the undersea cables connecting the country.

Geographically its relatively close to Singapore (compared to other data centers anyway), all of the cables from the eastern side of the country either go up to Japan via Guam or go to the US via Hawaii. Its not uncommon to see a route from Sydney to Singapore go through the US, and/or Japan before reaching Singapore.

oscarwao 13 years ago |

Keep in mind that the S3 Virgnia location (known as US Standard Regionin AWS terms) includes endpoints in Virginia and in the Pacific Northwest. Hence that may be why the Virginia to Virginia numbers were high compared to the other regions.

"The US Standard Region automatically routes requests to facilities in Northern Virginia or the Pacific Northwest using network maps." http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

donavanm 13 years ago | |

The us-east and SEA end points for US Standard buckets are directly addressable as well. Consistency will be tighter if you PUT and GET to the same endpoint.

Edit: that's be s3-external-1.amazonaws.com for us-east and s3-external-2.amazonaws.com for the PNW. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/message.jspa?messageID=185820

jedberg 13 years ago | |

If that's the cause of slowness then their network maps are broken.

eran_rl75 13 years ago |

Interesting!! We've tried conducting similar tests where I work a few months ago. We had to deploy a few servers and tried to figure out the optimal spread.

tawgx 13 years ago |

Thanks for putting this up. I'd be very intrested to know if anyone has ever done a similar test with Azure?

chookrl 13 years ago | |

We haven't tested Azure Cloud Storage. However, we did test other cloud computing hosts such as GoGrid and Rackspace. Their upload speeds were almost the same and sometimes even better than EC2 when uploading to AWS S3. Perhaps we will test Azure in a follow-up post.

blahpro 13 years ago |

Interesting. It might also be useful to see latencies between regions (or even availability zones).