Amazon AWS EC2 is just slow

June 9, 2011 in aws | No comments

So far disappointed, mainly by speed.

I am setting some eshop what is meant to be mainly for Australian customers. Because whole Oz is 10years behind in internet business, i’ve not found proper hosting, so i’ve decided to give AWS a try.
AWS offers instances in different regions, so i’ve choose Singapore, as it seems geographically closest to Oz. Big mistake. Personally, i have no idea why they have data center in Singapore at all.
It is just terribly slow!
I’ve done some test to measure latency from London, Brisbane and Sydney (I’ve joined Oz results into one, because the difference was < 10ms). Each time i've used 32 Amazon OS small instance with attached elastic IP. Here are results:

region London ping (ms) Australian ping (ms)
US west 170 172
US east 100 245
EU 24 316
Tokyo 275 294
Singapore 374 339



As you can see, Singapore region si useless. So i am moving to US West, even so this seems to me to be the farthest place from Australia. But because of this is newer data center than US East, its probably right.
Anyway latency of 170ms isn’t the greatest one, but so far ll have to be enough.