Azure Storage Simulator performance issues

Question

I am trying to setup a windows server to be my on-premises server. I was able to overcome the connection issues (the Computer Emulator only listens to 127.0.0.1), and now I face a new, more difficult problem.

Writing to the local BLOB storage takes a very long time.

I wrote a simple "hello world" ASP.NET Web Role that writes a random file to a Queue and to a BLOB. The web role runs on the same machine with the storage emulator. Writing to the Queue is fairly fast, but the BLOB is a completely different story.

Writing to the BLOB made my web role work 50 times slower(!).

Using the exact same code against the cloud storage made it work much faster. This tells me that the problem definitely lies in using the local storage emulator.

Does anyone have an idea how to boost the storage emulator's performance?

Thank you for your time, Elad

Answer 1

Congratulations on getting the server to work on premises, that always seemed like too much hard work to me. As you've gone to all of that effort I'm presuming that it's to avoid paying for compute instances in the cloud while you develop or test.

I apologise in advance that I'm not actually going to answer your question about how to speed up development storage. This is because development storage and I really just don't get along. It's pretty close to what you get from actual cloud storage, but the differences can be significant enough to cause problems if you develop against development storage then switch to the real thing.

In short, I'd say just ignore dev storage and connect straight to the cloud even though you're running locally. This will have a cost associated with it, but in my experience the costs for storage are really quite small. $5 per month will go a long way.