Amazon EC2 Network and S3 performance

When a distributed application is running in-house the IT has a lot of control over the environment. They know exactly about the hardware and resources available:

network bandwith available
network latency

Now move to EC2 and other than some vague figures there is very little documented.

The guys at RighScale did some tests for ‘EC2-EC2′ bandwidth and ‘EC2-S3′ bandwidth which is very informative. To test ‘EC2-EC2′ large instance bandwidth they used apache(non-SSL) and curl(one instance acting as a server the other as a client)

“Using 1 single curl file retrieval, we were able to get around 75MB/s consistently. And adding additional curls uncovered even more network bandwidth, reaching close to 100MB/s”

They also got quite good numbers between an EC2 instance and S3 using curl to download and upload from/to S3.

	1 Curl (MB/S)	Max(MB/S)
Download SSL	12.6	49.8 (8 curls)
Download non SSL	10.2	51.5 (8 curls)
Upload SSL	6.9	53.8 (12 curls)

So in both EC2-EC2 and EC2-S3 the bandwidth is quite reasonable for a general purpose application and you can get 1 Gigabit between 2 EC2 instances.

Now what about network latency? A friend of mine sent me a link to an interesting paper which contains some interesing latency information. The paper is “Benchmarking Amazon EC2 for high-performance scientific computing” . To test the latency they used mpptest to measure both network performance and latency. The results compared to infinband are an order of magnitude inferior!