Amazon AMIs

[Matthew Seaman]

Hi,

I've been playing with setting up a very simple website on AWS to do 
speedtesting for the ISP I work for[*].  Naturally I used the FreeBSD 
12.0 AMIs.  The result with the default m4.large instance was actually 
pretty dissapointing:

speedtest:~:% iperf3 -p 443 -P 3 -c test1.lightspeed.gigaclear.com
Connecting to host test1.lightspeed.gigaclear.com, port 443
[  4] local 46.227.144.15 port 38926 connected to 3.8.245.243 port 443
[  6] local 46.227.144.15 port 38928 connected to 3.8.245.243 port 443
[  8] local 46.227.144.15 port 38930 connected to 3.8.245.243 port 443
[...]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   177 MBytes   148 Mbits/sec  123             sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec   176 MBytes   147 Mbits/sec 
receiver
[  6]   0.00-10.00  sec   281 MBytes   236 Mbits/sec  155             sender
[  6]   0.00-10.00  sec   280 MBytes   235 Mbits/sec 
receiver
[  8]   0.00-10.00  sec   206 MBytes   173 Mbits/sec  118             sender
[  8]   0.00-10.00  sec   205 MBytes   172 Mbits/sec 
receiver
[SUM]   0.00-10.00  sec   664 MBytes   557 Mbits/sec  396             sender
[SUM]   0.00-10.00  sec   661 MBytes   554 Mbits/sec 
receiver

Couldn't even saturate a 1G link.

So I tried one of the newer m5.large instance instead.  As well as being 
rather newer and better integrated with FreeBSD (m5 has if_ena 
interfaces, nvd disk devices rather than m4 which has ixv and xbd 
disguised as ada for the root device but not for additional drives), 
they're actually slightly cheaper for the same nominal CPU count, RAM 
and disk:

speedtest:~:% iperf3 -p 443 -P 3 -c test0.lightspeed.gigaclear.com
Connecting to host test0.lightspeed.gigaclear.com, port 443
[  4] local 46.227.144.15 port 54264 connected to 18.130.169.5 port 443
[  6] local 46.227.144.15 port 54266 connected to 18.130.169.5 port 443
[  8] local 46.227.144.15 port 54268 connected to 18.130.169.5 port 443
[...]
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval           Transfer     Bandwidth       Retr
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.90 GBytes  1.63 Gbits/sec  2484 
sender
[  4]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.89 GBytes  1.63 Gbits/sec 
receiver
[  6]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.87 GBytes  1.60 Gbits/sec  3381 
sender
[  6]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.86 GBytes  1.60 Gbits/sec 
receiver
[  8]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.90 GBytes  1.64 Gbits/sec  3607 
sender
[  8]   0.00-10.00  sec  1.90 GBytes  1.63 Gbits/sec 
receiver
[SUM]   0.00-10.00  sec  5.67 GBytes  4.87 Gbits/sec  9472 
sender
[SUM]   0.00-10.00  sec  5.65 GBytes  4.86 Gbits/sec 
receiver

So, about 2Gb/s with an out-of-the-box configuration and no tuning.

Question:  Why is m4.large the recommended instance type?  Surely we'd 
be better served and present users with a better experience by 
recommending an m5 instance as one of the more modern and higher 
performance types?

	Cheers,

	Matthew


[*] It's an OfCom requirement here in the UK.  If what we sell is 
described as a 940Mb/s pure fibre connection, then by golly it should be 
capable of pulling down 940Mb/s even at peak usage times of day[+].  So 
we need to measure this regularly, which means we need to roll out a 
bunch of small devices to sit in customer premises and run automated 
tests downloading large blobs of random data from a website "not on our 
own network."

[+] We can't count packet headers as part of the delivered bandwidth, or 
this would just be a 1Gb/s service.