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Quick Bench: S3 Transfer Acceleration vs Direct Upload

Quick test, not a rigorous benchmark — just logging numbers before I forget them. Tagged lab-note — shorter and rougher than the full write-ups, filterable via the tag search on the posts page.

Setup

  • Uploading a 500MB file from a home connection in Jakarta
  • Target bucket in ap-southeast-1 (Singapore)
  • Compared: direct aws s3 cp vs the same command against the *.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com endpoint
  • 5 runs each, averaged, network otherwise idle

Results

MethodAvg timeAvg throughput
Direct upload71s~7.0 MB/s
Transfer Acceleration68s~7.4 MB/s

Takeaway

Basically a wash for this route. Makes sense — Jakarta to Singapore is already short and well-peered, so there’s not much latency for Transfer Acceleration’s edge-routing to save. I’d expect a bigger gap uploading to a bucket in us-east-1 or eu-west-1 from here, where the request would otherwise cross more of the public internet before reaching AWS’s backbone.

Next: rerun this against a us-east-1 bucket to see if the gap opens up. Also want to test with a batch of small files instead of one large one — Transfer Acceleration’s benefit profile is supposed to differ there.