Life Scaling » Performance http://orensol.com Oren Solomianik's Blog Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:10:03 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Network Latency Inside And Across Amazon EC2 Availability Zones http://orensol.com/2009/05/24/network-latency-inside-and-across-amazon-ec2-availability-zones/ http://orensol.com/2009/05/24/network-latency-inside-and-across-amazon-ec2-availability-zones/#comments Sun, 24 May 2009 12:40:55 +0000 Oren http://orensol.com/?p=226 I couldn’t find any info out there comparing network latency across EC2 Availability Zones and inside any single Availability Zone. So I took 6 instances (2 on each US zone), ran some test using a simple ping, and measured 10 Round Trip Times (RTT). Here are the results.

Single Availablity Zone Latency Availability [...]]]> I couldn’t find any info out there comparing network latency across EC2 Availability Zones and inside any single Availability Zone. So I took 6 instances (2 on each US zone), ran some test using a simple ping, and measured 10 Round Trip Times (RTT). Here are the results.

Single Availablity Zone Latency

Availability Zone Minimum RTT Maximum RTT Average RTT
us-east-1a 0.215ms 0.348ms 0.263ms
us-east-1b 0.200ms 0.327ms 0.259ms
us-east-1c 0.342ms 0.556ms 0.410ms

It seems that at the time of my testing, zone us-east-1c had the worst RTT between 2 instances in it, almost twice as slow as the other 2 zones.

Cross Availablity Zone Latency

Availability Zones Minimum RTT Maximum RTT Average RTT
Between us-east-1a and us-east-1b 0.885ms 1.110ms 0.937ms
Between us-east-1a and us-east-1c 0.937ms 1.080ms 1.031ms
Between us-east-1b and us-east-1c 1.060ms 1.250ms 1.126ms

It’s worth noting that in cross availability zones traffic, the first ping was usually off the chart, so I disregarded it. For example, it could be anywhere between 300ms to 400ms, and the the rest would fall down to ~0.300. Probably some lazy routing techniques by Amazon’s routers.

Conclusions

  1. Zones are created different! — At least at the time of the testing, if you have a cluster on us-east-1b it performs almost twice as fast with regards to RTT between machines than a cluster on us-east-1c.
  2. Cross Availability Zones latency can be 6 times higher than inner zone latency. For a network intensive application, better keep your instances crowded in the same zone.

I should probably also make a throughput comparison between and across Availability Zones. I promise to share if I get to test it.

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