Time to first byte and Amazon S3

I’m using Amazon S3 for my images but the time to first byte on all content from S3 seems very long, is this just me or does everyone experience this.
I’ve tried accessing as a CNAME, through the S3 link and through the cloudfront link but all the same - its like 400-600ms for each image with the time to first byte taking up 99% of this time

Is the S3 region near where you are running the tests from?

I’m using the S3 server in Dublin and running the test from Dublin and London
Results here for Dublin
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110714_0J_1268D/1/details/

In that case the times do look a lot longer than I’d expect to see. When you test against cloudfront make sure to do several runs because the first visit will load the edge cache in in CDN. I’m not surprised that S3 is slow but if cloudfront is consistently slow then they have a pretty big problem.

In this one http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110714_PF_126AN/1/details/
Im getting all hits for Cloudfront bar one for the js, but it still doesn’t seem to have made much if any difference.
Trying out RackSpace now for a test to see how they compare[hr]
Dunno which seems best here
Rackspace EU server -dunno where
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110715_NP_126DN/1/details/

S3 Server - Dublin
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110715_EP_126DY/

Make sure to do several runs to let the CDN cache your file - the first hit will always be slower because it has to go to the source to fetch the file.

I did 5 runs of each and rackspace looks about like your current site (not sure if it is running on cloudfront):

Current site (~70ms): http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110715_EG_12AZJ/5/details/

Rackspace (72ms): http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110715_VD_12AYP/5/details/