May 212012
 

I was running crawler-like application on my EC2 nodes, which grab a set of web pages, save them locally, then do some follow-ups, obviously I hit the bottleneck of the EC2 nodes.

It seems EC2’s storage, at least EBS performs quite bad, I don’t have comparison in number, but for the follow-ups jobs, which are nothing to do with network, EC2 is hundreds or thousands times slower than a regular modern machine.

I guess traditional applications on EC2 don’t rely on EBS too much – most data write to S3/RDS/SDB, etc. However, I do have to pay more attention on this as there is a friend gets to run some critical jobs and I recommended EC2 … I will do some more tests and post result here if I find anything signaficant.