These benchmarks were done by someone who seems to have no idea about the ins-and-outs of EC2. For example, there's a lot of IO bound tests... but they're on instance storage. What about Instance storage vs EBS? What about network performance over time?<p>All I can get from these is that Amazon isn't lying that their instance sizes are different in terms of compute units and memory.
It looks strange to me that High-CPU Instances didn't come as clear winners in compilation tests. I thought of choosing only between c1.medium and c1.xlarge for my CPU-intensive tasks. Looks like I should look closely into all types of instances instead, except for micro and small.<p>According to the specs Amazon gives us, "High-Memory" instances have 3.25 Compute Units per virtual core, while "High-CPU" only 2.5. It would be interesting to know what is going on: are their compilation tests unable to properly utilize many cores, or the nodes assigned to "High-Memory" instances tend to have more powerful hardware, or what?
I was hoping for more extensive and definitive. Bandwidth? Latency? Startup time? A meaningful sample with variation from day to day and an idea of variation across instances running at the same time?<p>For all the dollars being thrown at EC2, I'm surprised someone hasn't gone nuts with benchmarking this for the authority, notoriety and seo link juice.
<a href="http://cloudharmony.com/" rel="nofollow">http://cloudharmony.com/</a> has at least as extensive benchmarks, and includes other cloud providers.