As I said in my last post: S3 is NOT a CDN. It is an amazing Simple Storage Service, not a Simple Delivery Service.
Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
In this post I am going to show you why PostHaven (and Vine for that matter) should switch to a CDN. I am going to use a service called Catchpoint that will measure the performance of this 61kb image:
medium_bitcoin-660x493.jpg (view on S3 | view on CDN) from a post Garry wrote about Bitcoins. Lets take a look after an hour of testing with a check frequency of 5 minutes hitting 7 different points of presence:
Note: Throughput (higher is better): The numerical representation of how efficiently the system was able to retrieve the element in KBps. Throughput is calculated as (File Size + Header Size) / (1st Byte + Load Time).
Chart Summary
PostHaven MaxCDN
| # Runs | Avg DNS (ms) | Avg Connect (ms) | Avg Time To First Byte (ms) | Avg Response (ms) | Avg Throughput | Avg Webpage Response (ms) | % Availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 82.00 | 38.32 | 6.49 | 51.07 | 70.88 | 6,103.92 | 70.88 | 100.00 |
PostHaven S3
| # Runs | Avg DNS (ms) | Avg Connect (ms) | Avg Time To First Byte (ms) | Avg Response (ms) | Avg Throughput | Avg Webpage Response (ms) | % Availability |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 82.00 | 122.30 | 70.16 | 396.29 | 592.55 | 361.18 | 592.55 | 100.00 |
* The following metric name prefix SD, Avg, GM and Mdn stand for Standard Deviation, Average, Geometric Mean and Median respectively.
Take Away
Whether PostHaven goes with our CDN or with another provider, I just hope anyone reading this takes this away: Do not use S3 as a CDN, it is not designed for that. You are wasting money and your users time.Oh and have a great weekend everyone. =)