How to Easily Enhance Amazon S3 Performance?

Arjun was happily using Amazon S3 to store his website files. One day, he had a question:

“Is there a way to make my uploads and downloads faster?”

The answer? Yes!
Amazon S3 is already fast, but with a few smart tweaks, Arjun learned how to supercharge his S3 performance.

⚡ How Fast Is S3 by Default?

Amazon S3 auto-scales to handle thousands of requests per second
It delivers the first byte of any file in about 100–200 milliseconds
Most of the time, you don’t need to configure anything — it just works!

🤔 What Is a Prefix?

In S3, a prefix is just the “folder path” before a file name.

Example:

bucket-name/photos/2024/pic.jpg

File: pic.jpg
Prefix: photos/2024/

Each prefix in S3 has its own request limit.

📈 Why Does Prefix Matter?

S3 gives these limits per prefix:

Action Type	Requests Per Second
PUT, POST, DELETE	3,500
GET, HEAD	5,500

So if you store all your files in the same folder, they share the same limit.

But if you organize files into multiple folders (prefixes), you can scale much higher.

🧠 Simple Analogy

Each prefix is like a highway lane.
More prefixes = more lanes = more speed!

📉 What Happens If You Exceed the Limit?

If 10,000 users try to download a file at the same time, and all requests go through one prefix:

✅ First 5,500 requests/second will succeed
❌ Remaining 4,500 requests/second may:
- Be throttled
- Get HTTP 503 (SlowDown) errors

🛠️ How to Handle High Traffic

1️⃣ Use Multiple Prefixes

Split file access across different paths:

/files/set1/report.pdf  
/files/set2/report.pdf  
/files/set3/report.pdf

Each prefix has its own request quota — giving you higher total throughput.

2️⃣ Use Amazon CloudFront (CDN)

CloudFront caches your file at edge locations worldwide
Handles millions of requests per second
Takes pressure off S3 entirely

📘 Best Practice: Use CloudFront + S3 for public files or global access

📤 Want Faster Uploads? Use Multipart Upload

When Arjun uploaded large files, he used multipart upload.

✅ What It Does:

Breaks large files into chunks
Uploads parts in parallel
S3 puts them back together

🔸 When to Use:

Recommended for files over 100 MB
Required for files over 5 GB

“Uploads were smoother and more reliable,” Arjun noted.

🌍 Need Speed from Far Locations? Use Transfer Acceleration

Arjun’s global users had slow uploads to his bucket in another region.

✅ Fix: S3 Transfer Acceleration

Files first go to the nearest AWS edge location
Then sent over AWS’s fast private network to the bucket

Great for cross-continent uploads.

📥 Want Faster Downloads? Use Byte-Range Fetch

Sometimes Arjun needed only part of a file.

With byte-range fetches, he could:

Download just the parts he needed
Download different parts in parallel
Retry only the failed chunk

“It saved time and bandwidth, especially for large files.”

✅ Quick Summary

Feature	What It Helps With
Prefix Limits	Spread traffic across folders to scale
Multipart Upload	Upload large files faster
Transfer Acceleration	Speed up uploads from distant regions
Byte-Range Fetch	Download parts of a file faster

💡 Arjun’s Final Tip

“You don’t have to be a performance expert. Just organize your files well and use the right tools for big or global uploads.”

📘 SAA Exam Tip

Know that prefix = folder path
Understand request-per-second limits
Learn when to use multipart upload, byte-range fetch, and transfer acceleration
Remember that CloudFront is ideal for high traffic and global delivery