We started by comparing Cloud Files with S3, mainly because:

1. The pricing are similar when you consider we’re serving visitors from Hong Kong through CDN, and
2. Amazon CDN – CloudFront seems not working really well in Hong Kong, having latency issues since it’s launch and that hurt websites that serving a lot of small files.

So we did a little experiment to compare is Cloud Files’s CDN better? We find the result might be interesting for someone else so we posted here but it’s by no mean scientific or authoritative, bear in mind that we’re testing it in Hong Kong and all we want to compare is how well it serve static small files for website. Feel free to contact us if you want to know about other factors we’ve been thinking about.

Environment

• Firefox with FireBug
• PCCW 4MB Business Internet Connection
• To load FONCEPT frontpage with 21 images, 3 CSS, 11 Javascript.(yea we know we shouldn’t have so many Javascript files…

Flash Loading (sec)

Trial	| S3 Performance (with CDN)	| Cloud Files (with CDN)
1	| 6.58				| 2.56
2	| 7.08				| 3.19 
3	| 7.34				| 5.48
4	| 6.59				| 3.15
5	| 8.36				| 3.76
6	| 7.40				| 3.28
7	| 7.03				| 4.19
8	| 9.28				| 3.93
9	| 9.00				| 3.57
10	| 8.80				| 3.98
Average	| 7.75				| 3.71
S.D.	| 1.02				| 0.79

Observation

• Cloud Files take longer time just to give 404 sometimes (> 1sec), a wild guess is the CDN is not caching for non-existed files.
• [anything else?]