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I have a web application hosted in Amazon EC2 as well as in Rackspace. Users can upload files through this application and also modify them. Those files are stored in local storage in each of these servers and are synchronized using unison. In order to avoid handling synchronization issues, I wanted to explore Amazon S3 using s3fs. It worked, but the performance was very poor, it was almost 10 times slower. Am I trying anything wrong? Is S3 should only be used for backup, and only local storage used for run-time updates? Please provide your comments.

Thanks, Srikanth

Aditya Patawari
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Srikanth Vittal
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I would not recommend using s3 for run time operations. Local storage is attached to the Instance. Even if you use a EBS, it is still a single hop. But with s3 network latency plays a major role and kills the true real time experience.

If your users are fine with some delay then you can go ahead with s3, otherwise I would say that Local storage is much better for your operation.

Aditya Patawari
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  • Thanks for your reply. I tried S3QL rather than S3FS, and the performance was better. However, it was not as good as EBS. Anyway, I hope we can live with the slowness, whereas on the stability side S3 is good. Thanks. – Srikanth Vittal Dec 14 '12 at 05:48