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They beat me to it! I've only gotten to 500k on EC2, however i believe there's some trickery in their firewalls / NAT which is holding me back... If anyone's interested in the gory details, see: http://splinter.com.au/tag/comet

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Curious about what you've seen from the EC2 networking gear that's holding you back? Firewall not letting more connections through?

Well, at the moment i can't pin it down to EC2, but it's the only thing i can imagine it'd be. The network/cpu/memory usage is all healthy, and there's nothing in the kernel log, so that's what i'm guessing is the cause. Although i may be wrong.

We've observed the bottleneck to be an upper limit on packets/sec for a given instance type. On an m1.large this is about 100k/sec. I believe it's due to the virtual NIC just not being fast enough to handle high traffic loads.

The rightscale folks found the same thing:

http://blog.rightscale.com/2010/04/01/benchmarking-load-bala...

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