I don't have any experience regarding server hosting performance and how slow it gets so I wanted to ask this question.
My situation is, I want to host a ~1MB data file that needs to be downloaded by clients occasionally (once every 2-3 days). Of course I would like to minimize costs as long as it does not hurt user experience too much. I have data to indicate that I have clients globally.
I wanted to ask what the ballpark figure would be for the amount of time it would take to download a file of this size from other parts of the world (data is hosted in the US). Does anyone have any idea, for instance, how long it would take to download a 1MB file from locations such as Japan?
In case people are wondering, I personally would consider it OK if it takes under 10s to download in most parts of the world.
The first thing to do when you don't know how well something works... is to try it. Create buckets in all of the regions, store a file, and then download it and see.
The official AWS-centric answer for global content distribution is to connect a CloudFront distribution to an S3 bucket, and set things up so that your content is downloaded from S3 via CloudFront. This will tend to improve download speeds more when the user is distant from the bucket, even if the content isn't cached at a CloudFront edge, because most of the distance the download has to travel, it will be traveling on the AWS "Edge Network," a global network connecting CloudFront to the AWS regions, with fewer unknowns than the Internet at large between here and wherever.
I have a global client base, but -- for example -- my shopping pages' catalog images are stored in S3 in Oregon (us-west-2), but with links pointing to CloudFront.
Interestingly, the pricing for using both services together sometimes works out a little bit less expensive than using only S3. A possible explanation for this is that edge network egress traffic represents a lower cost to AWS and the rates are set accordingly. It's not a major difference, but once you understand the pricing tables, you'll see it.
1MB in 10s equals 800kbps. I'd be very surprised if any reputable hosting provider couldn't keep up with that speed of delivery. Looking at Akamai rankings (2015)*, in Japan (as in your example) the average user's speed is 15Mbps: your file would then be downloaded in 0.53 seconds.
( *Looking at the rankings, keep in mind that in countries where fast internet infra is yet to be ubiquitous, the "average speed" will be an average of fast corporate pipes and other premium links, with actual mainstream users having substantially slower speeds.)
Then in most cases, this will be up to the user's connection speed, and further, their ISP's international links, which can be much slower than their national or regional pipes. More so in countries with less developed internet infrastructure, where operators are cutting costs and corners.
In deciding if you need to deploy S3 or other CDN solutions, or no extra solutions at at all, you'll have to start with mapping up your user demographics. If there's a substantial sector from far-away countries with weak net infra, it makes sense. Otherwise, it doesn't seem likely that your target speed of 1MB/10s wouldn't be matched even without a special means of delivery.
If you have some but not substantial traffic from countries/regions where you reckon int'l traffic might be slower, and if you want to eliminate extra costs, I figure your users will survive even if it takes 15-20 seconds once in a blue moon as their speeds fluctuate. (This is opinion-based relative to how picky your users are!) In such a case, I'd only bother with a CDN if I wanted to improve speeds across the board, e.g. for all requests for static resources, not just a single file requested every couple of days. Would make a more substantial contribution towards the general user experience.
I am running an Azure web role, which is storing very small blobs into Azure storage. (Blob upload is being done from the server, not from the browser.) I have searched stack overflow and the rest of the internet for tips on optimizing blob storage performance, and I believe I've checked and implemented all of the usual suspects: uploading async, allowing unlimited outgoing web connections (which now seems to be the default setting on web roles and no longer needs to be explicitly set in web.config or in code).
Tweaking the number of concurrent uploads I allow makes some difference, but regardless of what I've tried, I seem to max out at around 1,000 blob uploads per second. This is when running in the Azure web role, in the same region as the storage account (East US). My rate when running this from home over a good internet connection isn't much less, ~700 blobs/sec, which seems to tell me that it's not the network latency that's limiting the rate, it's the actual processing time of the storage service.
I wouldn't normally consider these rates horrible for this kind of a service, but I've read that Microsoft boasts a rate of ~20,000 storage transactions per second, so I've been a little disappointed with these results.
I'd like to get some feedback from those who have really tried to push the limits of blob storage. Does ~1000 small uploads per second sound about right? Or is there possibly something else I should be doing to improve this? I'll post the code if I need to, but I'd rather not receive speculative answers, I'd like to hear from developers who can either confirm that my results are reasonable, or that they've seen much higher throughput.
I should add that I'm currently running this in a small web role. I've tried it also in a medium web role, and didn't see any significant difference.
EDIT:
After a few days of development and testing, my upload rate seemed to suddenly increase. Not by a lot, but maybe by another ~200 per second. In looking around the web, I noticed a comment in the Azure documentation stating "A storage account scales automatically as usage increases." So I'm wondering if it really is capable of much higher rates, but will not automatically scale up until it sees sustained period of high volume. Some confirmation of that would also be greatly appreciated.
Depending on how small your requests are the problem might be caused by Nagle’s Algorithm is Not Friendly towards Small Requests - although usually I see that with queues / table operations. Try disabling Nagle's and let me know if that makes any difference. As an fyi, you have to disable it prior to establishing the connection otherwise the changes will not take effect.
Jason
How fast can we download files from Amazon S3, is there an upper limit (and they distribute it between all the requests from the same user), or does it only depend on my internet connection download speed? I couldn't find it in their SLA.
What other factors does it depend on? Do they throttle the data transfer rate at some level to prevent abuse?
This has been addressed in the recent Amazon S3 team post Amazon S3 Performance Tips & Tricks:
First: for smaller workloads (<50 total requests per second), none of
the below applies, no matter how many total objects one has! S3 has a
bunch of automated agents that work behind the scenes, smoothing out
load all over the system, to ensure the myriad diverse workloads all
share the resources of S3 fairly and snappily. Even workloads that
burst occasionally up over 100 requests per second really don't need
to give us any hints about what's coming...we are designed to just
grow and support these workloads forever. S3 is a true scale-out
design in action.
S3 scales to both short-term and long-term workloads far, far greater
than this. We have customers continuously performing thousands of
requests per second against S3, all day every day. [...] We worked with other
customers through our Premium Developer Support offerings to help them
design a system that would scale basically indefinitely on S3. Today
we’re going to publish that guidance for everyone’s benefit.
[emphasis mine]
You may want to read the entire post to gain more insight into the S3 architecture and resulting challenges for really massive workloads (i.e., as stressed by the S3 team, it won't apply at all for most use cases).
The biggest hurdle I have in developing an effective backup strategy is being able to do some sort of offsite backup. Unfortunately, this can only be via uploading data to the offsite source but my internet cable has upload speeds which prohibit this.
Has anyone here managed to do offsite backups of large libraries of source code?
This is only relevant to home users and not in the workplace where budgets may open up doors.
EDIT: I am using Windows Vista (So 'nix solutions aren't relevant).
Thanks
I don't think your connections upload speed will be as prohibitive as you think. Just make sure you look for a solution where your changes can be sent as diffs. Even if your initial sync takes days, daily changes would likely be more manageable.
Knowing a few more specifics about how much data you are talking about, and exactly how slow your connection is, I think would allow the community to make more specific suggestions.
Services like Mozy allow you to back up large amounts of data offsite.
They upload slowly in the background, and getting the initial sync to the servers can take a while depending on your speed and amount of data, but after that they use efficient diffs to keep the stored data in sync.
The pricing is very home-friendly too.
I think you have to define backup and whats acceptable to you.
At my house, i have a hot backup of our repositories where I poll svn once an hour over the VPN and it takes down any check ins. this is just to catch any check ins that are not captured each 24 hours via the normal backup. I also send a full backup every 2 days through the pipe to be outside of the normal 3 tier backup we do at the office. our current zipped repository is 2GB zipped at max compression. That takes 34 hrs at 12 k/s and 17hrs at 24k/s, you did not say the speed of your connection, so its hard to judge if thats workable.
If this isnt viable, you might want to invest in a couple of 2.5" USB drives and load/swap them offsite to a safety deposit box at the bank. this used to be my responsibility but I lacked the discipline to do this consistently each week to assure some safety net. In the end it was just easier to live uploading the data to an ftp site at my house.
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
So, I have a dedicated server. I host about dozen or so small sites.
Is there a real benefit in using S3(or Mosso) for my image and static file hosting? My server has more than enough disk space, or am I completely missing the point of S3?
I keep reading about how wonderful and cheap it is, and I ask myself "self, why aren't you using this" and the reply is always "why?"
if you're running within the included storage and bandwidth of your server and your needs are being served well, you are already doing the simplest thing that is working for you and that is where you should always start. Off the top of my head I can think of a couple reasons why you may want to move some storage to S3 in the future:
Your storage or bandwidth needs grow beyond what you have and S3 is cheaper than upgrading your current solution
You move to a multiple-dedicated-server solution for failover/performance reasons and want to be able to store your assets in a single shared location
Your bandwidth needs are highly
variable (so you can avoid a monthly
fee when you're not getting traffic) [Thanks Jim, from the comments]
If you run an entire website off of a single machine, and that machine is more than enough to handle your site, then kudos, images are not a bottleneck that needs solving right now. Forget about S3 for now.
However, as your server gets busier, you will want your server to be spending all of its time doing server things. Transferring static content like flat HTML files and images is an easy, dumb job, and wasting precious active connections, bandwidth, and CPU cycles on them is no good. By switching to S3, your server can concentrate on doing what's important, which is whatever your program actually DOES.
S3 also has benefits of being distributed around and attached to what's probably a fatter pipe than your server, which means the images will show up slightly more quickly on your client's machines, so that's an added bonus.
S3 is also backed up, which means that it makes for a pretty nice place to store pretty much any private data under the sun, in addition to stuff that you want to serve to others (although don't confuse the permissions settings between those two things -- in fact, you may want to use separate accounts entirely).
S3 is also nigh-infinite, which means that if you want to let users upload files to your site (profile images, attachments, etc), S3 is a great choice so that you don't have to constantly worry if your server is going to run out of disk space (obligatory $$$ warning here).
But like I said at the top, if you're a one-server setup with a handful of users, none of this really matters. It's a tool like any other, and it may not be something you need yet.
It's simply a matter of doing the numbers: given a certain amount of traffic for a set of files, you can calculate exactly how much hosting those file on S3 would cost you, and you should be able to do the same for your current provider. If the number is lower for S3, there you have your reason.
An added benefit is that S3 scales pretty much linearly with traffic and you pay only for what you actually use, whereas most providers charge you a flat fee no matter how little traffic you actially have, and some will gouge you badly if you ever exceed the maximum traffic included in the flat fee.
Better speed and availability could be an additional benefit.
Basically, if you have a site that could potentially incur wildly disparate traffic, then using S3 for its images and other static files means that if you're hit by the Slashdot effect, the site has a much better chance of staying reachable, and you have a much better chance of avoiding nasty surprises concerning excess traffic fees.
The advantages of Amazon S3 are reliability, scalability, speed and cost. Here is some info on each.
Reliability: Amazon stores your data in multiple data centers. If there was a disaster and one data center was destroyed your content would continue to be served from the second data center. It’s very unlikely that data you upload to Amazon would ever be lost.
Scalability: If one of your web sites becomes popular and millions of people visit the site, your web server will not be able to handle the load. In comparison when you upload your files to Amazon they are stored in multiple locations. If the load on your content grows your files are automatically replicated to more servers so your files will always be available.
Speed: Amazon has a service called CloudFront that works in conjunction with Amazon S3. When you activate CloudFront on your S3 content your content is moved to edge locations. These are servers that make your content available for high speed transfer.
Cost: With Amazon S3 you only pay for what you use. If you have a few files that get little traffic you will only pay a few cents a month.
SprightlySoft has a blog post which gives even more reasons why Amazon S3 is great. Read it at http://sprightlysoft.com/blog/?p=8
If you're hosting a high-traffic site, the bandwidth cost (and latency issues) of hosting images yourself makes S3 and other services like Akami attractive. For a low-traffic site, it probably isn't an issue.
I'd say that there's no reason if your base hosting plan provides enough space/bandwidth. Where I think it's useful is when your file transfers become enough that you have to look at buying an add-on of storage/bandwidth from the provider -- in that case, S3 may be a viable alternative. But if I'm paying $X/month and not using all of the storage, there's no upside to it.
On the other hand, if your capacity planning calls for you to someday exceed the provider's limits, S3 may be a good solution from the start so you don't have files being served from multiple places.
I would second the mention of "redundancy" -- you can count on any content that's in S3 to be distributed to multiple data centers, and effectively been very much always accessible for anyone with functioning network connection.
Cost may be another factor: data transfer rates for S3 are quite competitive.
And speed is the last one: you can access data VERY fast from S3. But that's more of an issue for data other than browser-viewable images.
For small sites, S3 or Mosso may not be that reasonable for image hosting, but if you have any video files (.wmv, .flv, etc...) or large downloads (app distributions, etc..), I'd still put them on S3 or Mosso to save potential bandwidth spikes if for some odd reason, your content becomes wildly popular.
You write:
My server has more than enough disk space, or am I completely missing the point of S3?
You are not missing the point if what you have on you server is write-once read-less-than-once stuff, such as disaster-recovery backups (which you hope will be read-never), because transfer times will not matter. The point of S3 is delivery speed.
First, S3 distributes your content geographically. End users benefit from shorter paths.
Second, S3 can act as a BitTorrent seed, which not only conserves your bandwidth, it means your most popular content will be distributed faster because it can take advantage of the ad-hoc swarm. There are reports on the AWS Discussion Forums that S3 support of the BitTorrent protocol is "very, very spotty." I have not tested it myself.
Many of you won't have this problem, but if you (and your web server) are located in Australia (read: the 3rd world of the Internet), you run into the issue that S3 does not have geographically close locations, which means there will be a higher latency on your images and other static content. Scalable: yes. Fast: no.
From what I hear, besides low cost, the main advantage is the ease of backup from an EC2 setup.
Link..
http://groups.drupal.org/node/2383
Speed might be the only benefit. If your dedicated server is simply networked through your ISP (which may well throttle upstream speeds even if downstream speeds are high) then you might find that your sites are often slow to load. If so, then S3 or another dedicated server provider can help. Other than that, I can think of absolutely no reason why Amazon's service would be more appropriate for you - especially with simple, static sites.
It's not really directly related to your actual hosting of web sites, but it's certainly an important part of it, especially if the sites don't belong to you alone -- S3 is a great backup solution. There are tools such as duplicity that can automatically and efficiently back things up onto S3 for you, and it's extremely cheap for this purpose. I back up a fairly large amount of data for less than $1/month.
Besides the Fat Pipe and Local Delivery arguments for S3 there is also the manner of a single server does not function optimally when its functioning both as a db server and as a file server. If your running any sort of db I would suggest offloading all your static files to s3. The cost is trivial and you will see pretty big performance gains on page load.