Performance of desktop computer vs Amazon EC2, CLI instructions

Question

I am trying to compose a string of CLI commands doing various things to some files in one swoop:

• Combine a number of aac files into a larger one, 33 files times 10 mb (MP4BOX)
• Taking a small PNG file and making a few alterations to it (imagemagick)
• Changing a few tags, including setting the above PNG as the artwork (AtomicParsley)
• Moving the file to an external HD (to mimic the file move to S3)
• Doing some file deletions
• Sending an email (sendEmail)

I have it up and running in terminal (an 2008 iMac) and it takes about 40 seconds to complete when using a ramdisk for the files. Most time is taken by the first (MP4BOX) and third (AtomicParsley) task.

Now I wonder how fast the different EC2 instances would handle the tasks. What plays the important role here, ram speed or processing speed? Would their "High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance” with 26 EC2 computing units be roughly/almost four times faster for my task than their "High-Memory Extra Large Instance” with 6,5 EC2 computing units? How much faster would either be compared to my 2.8 GHz C2D/ 4 GB 800 MHz ram iMac?

Answer 1

It's so cheap and easy to spin up an EC2 instance that I would just go ahead and test out your process with different types of EC2 server. Try a high CPU instance versus a high memory, lower CPU instance and compare the results.

You can use spot priced instances to minimize your cost.