s3-performance.md

Maximizing S3 Peformance

• 137% increase in AWS usage in the last year

• Factors to keep in mind when picking a region

  • Performance: Proximity to users and to other resources in AWS
  • Compliance
  • Cost

• Naming scheme is the most important thing

  • Necessary for consistent performance
  • Refer to their guide on Request Rate and Performance Considerations
  • Do not set a common prefix to all objects in the bucket (eg: 2013-01-02-myfile)
  • Instead make sure names have something random so transactions can be distributed evenly across partitions
    • Eg: hash the object name, or prefix it with a random sequence
    • You can also reverse the epoch
  • Use "folders" if you need more information on the original object name (eg: movies/)
  • When changing object names to comply, keep in mind it might take some time until the benefits apply

• TPS: transactions per second

  • All writes/reads count. Keep in mind simple apps doing uploads/image processing could rack several of TPS per user input

• Optimizing PUTs with multipart uploads

  • Gives you better performance as you use more bandwidth
  • Increases resiliency: do not upload everything again on errors
  • The final result is a single file in S3
  • Picking the size of each part:
    • 25-50MB recommended on high bandwidth, 10mb for mobile networks
    • Strike for a balance between part size and number of parts
      • Lots of small parts suffers with connection overhead
      • Few big parts doesn't give you the benefits above
  • When using SSL to upload watch out for CPU performance
    • Use AES-NI on hardware when available

• Optimizing GETs

  • Use CloudFront
    • Lower latency, higher transfer rate, less S3 gets
    • Also supports on demand video
  • Do range-based GETs to read files in parallel, getting similar benefits to multipart uploads
  • LIST can also be heavy/slow. Cache your object list in Dynamo/CloudSearch/RDS/etc to avoid it