Amazon EC2 & Performance Bottlenecks
About half a year ago I setup an EC2 node (small one) with a monitoring tool (PRTG) to monitor one of my clients who uses Akamai for their content delivery. The idea was to get an objective, outside view, of the site's performance.
As an interesting side effect I was also to able to monitor amazon's performance (see the graph below). Clearly there are many reasons why we see the sudden hike in the download time, but I can tell you that the site itself didn't change over that time frame and that therefore the load-time increase is either due to Akamai or Amazon. Based on the reports (or lack thereof) from the client I must assume that it's Amazon. It basically leads me to believe that something changed inside Amazon's EC2 product round and about September … interesting food for thought.
The graph above shows the load time for a full front-page download (HTTP), so this isn't just a 'ping' graph.
-niels