3 ms·

I see people stick things on S3 and assume it's fast, because it's fast for them. But, the difference between cloudfront and S3 (US) from Asia is huge.

by latch 15y ago

justincormack 15y ago
Out of interest, what is the difference for you of an S3 bucket in Asia versus Cloudfront? The other thing I am never sure about with CDNs is whether they will actually keep your items resident always, even infrequently used ones. If they evict them and go back to origin it does not help. Has anyone done eviction tests on say cloudfront to see what the policies are.
- latch 15y ago
  10mb binary file US Standard avg 112k/s took 1:31 Singapore avg 1290K/s took 0:07 Tokyo avg 895K/s took 0:11 Cloudfront avg 8758k/sec took 0:01 I'm in Hong Kong on a 100mb up/down line (and I can hit 10MB/sec up and down (at the same time)). The last 3 hops to cloudfront (ctinet is my provider): 5 014136128014.ctinets.com (14.136.128.14) 4.673 ms 3.392 ms 3.210 ms 6 119.27.63.37 (119.27.63.37) 3.624 ms 4.393 ms 3.298 ms 7 server-216-137-55-171.hkg1.cloudfront.net (216.137.55.171) 3.519 ms 3.594 ms 3.340 ms the relevant hops to singapore (it starts to get blocked at 12) 7 * ge-1-0-3-xcr1.hkg.cw.net (203.169.57.33) 7.182 ms 4.902 ms 8 xe-0-2-0-xcr1.sng.cw.net (195.2.10.30) 37.951 ms 38.858 ms * 9 p38895.sgw.equinix.com (202.79.197.87) 41.037 ms * 43.288 ms
veidr 15y ago
Right! I'm in Tokyo, with 4 different 100Mbps or 200Mbps fiber connections (different providers, at 3 locations). In Japan, that's normal btw, and costs about $50/mo. Vanilla S3 is so slow, it's not any faster than a bargain VPS hosted in America. CloudFront is WAY FASTER. In Asia, or at least Japan and South Korea, the slowness is psychologically compounded by the much higher speeds people are typically used to. So things hosted on CloudFront (or really any decent CDN with a presence in Japan) feel NORMAL, while most anything served from the USA (or Europe) feels SUPER SLOW. At home or the office, I get 10MB or 20MB per second with ping times of 8ms or so. That's from either CloudFront or AWS Tokyo region. Or downloading Apple OS updates or OpenSolaris images, basically any company down with Akamai or similar. With vanilla US S3 storage or AWS servers in US or US shared hosting like pair.com, it's more like 400KB/sec and 200ms+ pings. Same with Heroku (although I haven't tested that since last year). I think my experiences in this regard are typical here, for both home and most business users. If the server is hosted abroad, it is ghetto-slow unless the owner takes appropriate measures (.jp server or CDN). Not a priority for every site, I understand, but hopefully something worth considering.

I see people stick things on S3 and assume it's fast, because it's fast for them. But, the difference between cloudfront and S3 (US) from Asia is huge.

by latch 15y ago

I see people stick things on S3 and assume it's fast, because it's fast for them. But, the difference between cloudfront and S3 (US) from Asia is huge.

justincormack 15y ago

Out of interest, what is the difference for you of an S3 bucket in Asia versus Cloudfront? The other thing I am never sure about with CDNs is whether they will actually keep your items resident always, even infrequently used ones. If they evict them and go back to origin it does not help. Has anyone done eviction tests on say cloudfront to see what the policies are.

latch 15y ago
10mb binary file US Standard avg 112k/s took 1:31 Singapore avg 1290K/s took 0:07 Tokyo avg 895K/s took 0:11 Cloudfront avg 8758k/sec took 0:01 I'm in Hong Kong on a 100mb up/down line (and I can hit 10MB/sec up and down (at the same time)). The last 3 hops to cloudfront (ctinet is my provider): 5 014136128014.ctinets.com (14.136.128.14) 4.673 ms 3.392 ms 3.210 ms 6 119.27.63.37 (119.27.63.37) 3.624 ms 4.393 ms 3.298 ms 7 server-216-137-55-171.hkg1.cloudfront.net (216.137.55.171) 3.519 ms 3.594 ms 3.340 ms the relevant hops to singapore (it starts to get blocked at 12) 7 * ge-1-0-3-xcr1.hkg.cw.net (203.169.57.33) 7.182 ms 4.902 ms 8 xe-0-2-0-xcr1.sng.cw.net (195.2.10.30) 37.951 ms 38.858 ms * 9 p38895.sgw.equinix.com (202.79.197.87) 41.037 ms * 43.288 ms

veidr 15y ago

Right! I'm in Tokyo, with 4 different 100Mbps or 200Mbps fiber connections (different providers, at 3 locations). In Japan, that's normal btw, and costs about $50/mo. Vanilla S3 is so slow, it's not any faster than a bargain VPS hosted in America. CloudFront is WAY FASTER. In Asia, or at least Japan and South Korea, the slowness is psychologically compounded by the much higher speeds people are typically used to. So things hosted on CloudFront (or really any decent CDN with a presence in Japan) feel NORMAL, while most anything served from the USA (or Europe) feels SUPER SLOW. At home or the office, I get 10MB or 20MB per second with ping times of 8ms or so. That's from either CloudFront or AWS Tokyo region. Or downloading Apple OS updates or OpenSolaris images, basically any company down with Akamai or similar. With vanilla US S3 storage or AWS servers in US or US shared hosting like pair.com, it's more like 400KB/sec and 200ms+ pings. Same with Heroku (although I haven't tested that since last year). I think my experiences in this regard are typical here, for both home and most business users. If the server is hosted abroad, it is ghetto-slow unless the owner takes appropriate measures (.jp server or CDN). Not a priority for every site, I understand, but hopefully something worth considering.