EC2 performance inconsistancy?

Question

We launched a Large 64-bit instance and the performance was severely lacking. Commands like ls, less, and cat would take an absurd amount of time, like 10 seconds. A top revealed that the load was over 2 when in fact nothing was running on our shell, at least nothing that we had run.

When we launched a second instance, the performance was quick as expected. We are wondering if other people have experienced this type of performance variance. How often does this occur? We are exploring using EC2 as a compute cluster and this variance would be quite inconvenient if it happens often.

Answer 1

Yes, I've experienced this a couple of times - two or three times at least.

We usually open threads on the AWS support forum and sometimes even get a response. I'm not sure how much AWS monitors the forums, etc. but I think that unless we don't report the issues, they don't get fixed.

The usual fix is to terminate the instance and launch another.

Answer 2

we had this issues i don't know if it's related to your problem, but what i have noticed was that the mingetty process was consuming allot of resources, what i did was, i commented out a few tty's in inittab, reinitialized and load was gone. I know it sounds dumb, but it happened several times with fresh started instances.