[feniv]

Running a benchmark on services like this can be really tricky.

It really depends on which cluster you were allocated and what other applications were running at that time. If someone else was running a heavy process at the same time, then that could explain some of the sluggishness..

Even still, the numbers are so drastically different that this question does deserve a second look. Someone from Joyent or EC2 should really put together a solid benchmark to prove once and for that their service is indeed better in a wide range of compute and networking categories.