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A few years ago, I used CloudFront as a CDN for video files hosted on S3, and I ran into performance issues -- I think because the traffic was relatively low, a
by jordanlev 10y ago
A few years ago, I used CloudFront as a CDN for video files hosted on S3, and I ran into performance issues -- I think because the traffic was relatively low, and hence it took more time for the CDN to "reload its cache" (for lack of a better term) than it would have been to just serve the files directly from S3.
Just a word of caution for people thinking (as I did) that a CDN is an automatic performance boost for all situations... it might actually be a detriment if you don't get reasonably high traffic.
- jotaen 10y agoInteresting – can you quantify these performance issues somehow or do you have any other insight what was happening there? It surprises me to hear it, because when CloudFront refreshes an item, it should immediately start to forward the retrieved data from the first byte onwards. So, the maximal additional latency could be the initial roundtrip between CloudFront and the origin (which I suppose should be neglectable in case of S3).
- jordanlev 10y agoIt was a while ago (2011), and it was specifically with streaming videos using the RTMP protocol... so it might have been specific to that. But here is a StackOverflow answer someone wrote that explained the general idea of how CDN's might slow down the process for infrequently-accessed files: http://stackoverflow.com/a/7800805/477513 http://stackoverflow.com/a/7800805/477513 EDIT: In re-reading that S.O. answer, I see now that this is specific to LARGE files (these videos were 50+ MB each)... so your use-case of HTML files and images for a static site would probably not result in this performance problem.