After some initial confusing results measuring "before-and-after CloudFront/S3" performance, Dennis Opacki, Systems Operations Manager for Amazon Cloudfront offered to help. Working with the test results from a number of members of The UNIX and Linux Forums pulling a small 1623 byte gif object with
curl -s -w, we compiled the test results. For each location, we discarded the fastest and slowest times for the Origin Web Server (in Ireland) and the CloudFront (CF) sites and averaged the remaining three samples. The last two columns in the table below represents the difference in performance between the objects hosted. The data seems to suggest a fairly significant performance improvement (with Amazon CloudFront) for all locations worldwide except Ireland, which is not surprising, since Ireland is the location of the original server.
| . | Web Server (WS) in Ireland | CloudFront (CF) | Compare Performance (CF/WS) |
|---|
| Client Location | WS First-byte(s) | WS Total Transfer(s) | CF First-byte(s) | CF Total(s) | First-byte (%) | Total Transfer (%) |
| Ireland | 0.096 | 0.097 | 0.101 | 0.101 | 6% | 4% |
| Netherlands | 0.123 | 0.124 | 0.081 | 0.081 | -34% | -35% |
| St Paul, MN | 0.472 | 0.474 | 0.284 | 0.286 | -39% | -40% |
| Sofia, Bulgaria | 0.134 | 0.134 | 0.081 | 0.081 | -40% | -40% |
| Milan, Italy | 0.111 | 0.112 | 0.042 | 0.042 | -63% | -63% |
| Seattle, WA | 0.515 | 0.516 | 0.133 | 0.134 | -74% | -74% |
| Redwood City, CA | 0.324 | 0.327 | 0.041 | 0.045 | -86% | -86% |
| Ashburn, VA | 0.188 | 0.189 | 0.022 | 0.022 | -88% | -88% |
| Hong Kong | 0.944 | 0.944 | 0.048 | 0.048 | -95% | -95% |
As expected, the most improvement was from users in the US and Asia (Hong Kong), since the original web server resides in Ireland.
I want to thank all the members of The Unix and Linux Forums who took the time to run the tests and for Dennis of Amazon for helping compile the results.
Congratulations Amazon Web Services and CloudFront!!
Note: Our test results suggest that static web content hosted on Amazon's CDN can certainly help global user response time downloading (small) objects. This is what you would expect from a CDN.
