Is Amazon DynamoDB slower than Amazon RDS (php)? [closed]

Question

We use a bunch of AWS services hosted in the Singapore region. We have a few EC2 instances and an RDS instance. We were planning to migrate some of our data to Amazon DynamoDB, which will help in our application data design.

Unfortunately, DynamoDB is always slower than RDS. I have written a single row in a table created in the same region as our EC2 instances. Reading this row takes more than 1 second using the AmazonAWS SDK for php, and fetching a row from RDS using mysql takes more than 10 times lesser than that.

Is there something we can do to optimize this? I have disabled SSL, but I don't think it made much of a difference.

Answer 1

Possibly. DynamoDB has considerable latency and runs on top of a thicker application stack than does a RDS hosted database (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle).

However, IMO the key advantage of DynamoDB (and most NoSQL dbs) is that the latency is dependable. If you are seeing a 400 ms latency on record retrieval, you can count on that 400 ms latency with 1 session or with 100,000 sessions.

[Note: 1 second does seem like a long time - we able to get multiple records < second in most instances, but I've not really used the DynamoDB method for the PHP specific SDK (just .Net). I wonder if something else could be bottle-necking.]