Enjoying Rails

Today Amazon announced the availability of S3 in Europe.

Nice! Let’s play with it! Please notice that I am located in Denmark and that all tests were performed on my 2048/512 ADSL line.

Download the new version of Amazon S3 Authentication Tool for Curl

Unzip it and create an .s3curl file containing you AWS keys as described in the readme file.

Now let’s create some buckets - a US bucket and an EU bucket:

s3curl.pl –id personal –createBucket — http://s3.amazonaws.com/erichsen.net.us
s3curl.pl –id personal –createBucket=EU — http://s3.amazonaws.com/erichsen.net.eu


Fetch some test files a 50K file and a 10MB one:

wget ftp://ftptest1.tele.dk/pub/50Ktest.rnd
wget ftp://ftptest1.tele.dk/pub/10Mtestb.rnd


And upload them:

s3curl.pl –id=personal –acl public-read –put 10Mtestb.rnd — http://erichsen.net.us.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
s3curl.pl –id=personal –acl public-read –put 50Ktest.rnd — http://erichsen.net.us.s3.amazonaws.com/50Ktest.rnd
s3curl.pl –id=personal –acl public-read –put 10Mtestb.rnd — http://erichsen.net.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
s3curl.pl –id=personal –acl public-read –put 50Ktest.rnd — http://erichsen.net.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/50Ktest.rnd


Try fetching the large file from the US bucket a couple of times

ab -n 1 http://erichsen.net.us.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 50.325 seconds
…
Transfer rate: 208.37 [Kbytes/sec] received

ab -n 1 http://erichsen.net.us.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 48.351 seconds
…
Transfer rate: 216.87 [Kbytes/sec] received
And the EU bucket

ab -n 1 http://erichsen.net.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 47.907 seconds
…
Transfer rate: 218.88 [Kbytes/sec] received

ab -n 1 http://erichsen.net.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/10Mtestb.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 50.943 seconds
…
Transfer rate: 205.84 [Kbytes/sec] received
With respect to transfer rate they seem to perform about the same from my local machine’s point of view. But I guess that this is what is to expect. The EU bucket should give better response times and for large files the response times are only a small fraction of the total transfer time.

But what about the small file?

US bucket

ab -n 50 http://erichsen.net.us.s3.amazonaws.com/50Ktest.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 60.308 seconds
…
Time per request: 1206.16 [ms] (mean)
…


EU bucket

ab -n 50 http://erichsen.net.eu.s3.amazonaws.com/50Ktest.rnd
…
Time taken for tests: 26.676 seconds
…
Time per request: 533.52 [ms] (mean)


Now we’re talking!

Summary: For large files you could just as well use the US variant of S3. If you use S3 for serving the static files of your web site and most of your visitors come from Europe switching to the EU S3 should give your users significantly better load times.