Take the 2-minute tour ×

Transfer speeds from Amazon EC2 to Japan is slow as h***. Is there anything one can do to speed that up, except changing providers? Oh, we're using EC2's Singapore instance here.

share|improve this question

closed as too localized by Jeff Ferland, RolandoMySQLDBA, Michael Hampton, mdpc, Jacob Apr 5 '13 at 16:42


You do know about the ap-northeast-1 region, right? It's Amazon's datacenter located in Tokyo. –  jamieb Apr 5 '13 at 14:54

3 Answers 3

Where is the slowdown? Is it within the Amazon network or somewhere inbetween? Can you post a traceroute between you and the EC2 site?

Odds are you'll need to change ISPs, or have your ISP change the routes from you to Amazon to faster routes (which will probably cost them more money so good luck with that).

share|improve this answer
It's not our ISP. Our customers will dive in from all over Japan :-P The slowdown is likely due to the fact that Singapore is far from Japan and transfer is slow from there to here... It's funny, cause they even have their pages translated into Japanese... Anyway, I'm not surprised the line is slow. I'm surprised the line is THAT slow. –  Jonny Dec 9 '10 at 9:08
Anyway, tracerouting times out somewhere down the hops... –  Jonny Dec 9 '10 at 9:46
That might just be because some of the routers have ICMP blocked. Or it could be because the network is just that slow. Can you post the trace output? –  mrdenny Dec 10 '10 at 1:14

CDNs are designed to deliver content from the closest possible point to the user. They call this an "edge location".

Typically you'll use your server (EC2) as an ORIGIN for your CDN (CloudFront).

Your CDN then takes your source and makes copies of it all around the world in each of it's edge locations.

When your users request a file, your CDN figures out where they are, and sends the file from the nearest edge location.

This is how you get super quick downloads :)

share|improve this answer
up vote -1 down vote accepted

I found out that EC2 does not have "high speed" as one of its features. Amazon wants us to use their CloudFront service for that, as stated in the answer to my other question here. Amazon S3 access control + bandwidth

share|improve this answer
EC2 has very high speeds, higher than most hosts you'll encounter. CDNs improve virtually any site, as they help deal with fundamental limitations like the speed of light and internet routing. –  ceejayoz Apr 5 '13 at 14:40
