DO Block Storage Volume is 6x slower than AWS EBS volume

Part of our workflow involves doing a rsync several times a day from one folder to another on the same volume, usually with not many changes.

We’ve recently moved to DigitalOcean from AWS, and this has been a pain point as what used to take about 20 seconds now takes 2-3 minutes.

We haven’t shut down our old AWS server yet, so I ran the rsync command on both to compare, to get as close as possible to an apples-to-apples comparison. (DO $15 server with 3 cores, vs AWS 4-core) Both are formatted with XFS. Both were comparing about 650Mb of files, of which only 500Kb were changed.

DigitalOcean: 5,318,746.05 bytes/sec = 121.041s

AWS: 31,383,446.83 bytes/sec = 20.047s

The droplet graphs during that 2 mins shows low cpu, memory usage and disk i/o, so maybe the graph only shows the disk i/o for the built-in disk?

This page https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/volumes/ says volumes on standard droplets should get around 200MB/s, and burst up to 300MB/s

Questions:

1. What speeds should we expect for working on volumes? 5-6 MB/s is a big difference to 200-300 MB/s!

2. What impacts Volume speed?

3. Are there plans to show graphs for the Block Storage Volumes? (Or if the current graph includes it why didn’t my rsync show?)