Windows Azure Benchmarks – Part 1: Blobs read throughput

One of the most common questions customers ask is how does windows azure perform.
Well Microsoft published a series of benchmarks in an excellent web site called azurescope.
The thing is azurescope is going down on January 15th 2012 so I decided to publish these benchmarks here and make sure they will be available to the public.

Let us start with blobs read throughput

Key Analysis

• Throughput increases with the increase in number of concurrent clients (NumberOfWorkers * ThreadsPerWorker). You may have to increase the ServicePointManager.DefaultConnectionLimit for multiple threads to establish more than 2 concurrent connections with the storage. While downloading a large blob, consider downloading its chunks using concurrent threads. From within the threads, you can use BlobRequest.Get method to create requests for different portions of the blob.
• An increase in throughput is observed by increasing the VM size. However, in best cases, Small VMs perform as good as Medium VMs.
• Page blobs provide better throughput than block blobs.
• For a single worker, download throughputs upto 100 MBs/sec were observed.
• Using a block or page size of 4 MBs generally provides a better throughput.
• Using http endpoint provides better throughput than https endpoints.

Enjoy

Manu