Initial findings on EC2

Yesterday I reported that I was looking into EC2 to see how it performed as a MySQL Server. Well, I got around to running some benchmarks today. My home machine (AMD64 3000 (I think), Ubuntu 7.10, 7200RPM drive, 1G RAM) can handle almost 730 transactions/second on a basic sysbench test:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-table-engine=myisam --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock  prepare
sysbench --num-threads=16 --max-requests=100000 --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --oltp-read-only run

What does EC2 (small instance) rate? 132.26 transactions/second.

I've got to say - I'm a little disappointed, since that's more than 5 times worse. I will test the other instance types over the coming days, and try and make my environment a little more controlled.

Databases are often disk i/o bound. Maybe they've considered this and improved it in the other available options? There's no details mentioning it though. Sigh. Correction: There is some mention.