Self-Hosted S3 Storage Showdown: Performance Benchmarks Reveal Critical Tradeoffs

As enterprises increasingly deploy self-hosted object storage to avoid vendor lock-in and reduce costs, the choice between S3-compatible solutions carries significant performance implications. A new benchmark study by Repoflow rigorously compares four leading contenders—MinIO, Ceph RGW, SeaweedFS, and SwiftStack—under realistic workloads, revealing surprising performance cliffs and hidden tradeoffs.

The Testing Arena

Tests measured throughput and latency across three core S3 operations:
- PUT performance (object creation)
- GET performance (object retrieval)
- DELETE performance (cleanup operations)

Using Kubernetes-deployed instances on identical hardware (8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM), the benchmark simulated real-world conditions with varying object sizes (1KB to 1GB) and concurrency levels (1 to 64 threads). Crucially, all solutions used the same AWS S3 SDK for fair comparison.

Performance Breakdown

Throughput results at 32-thread concurrency with 1MB objects

MinIO consistently led across all tests, particularly excelling at high-concurrency DELETE operations critical for ephemeral workloads. SeaweedFS showed strong GET performance but exhibited higher tail latency under load. Ceph RGW demonstrated stability at scale while SwiftStack lagged significantly in write-intensive scenarios.

The Latency Trap

"The most startling finding wasn't peak throughput, but how latency profiles diverged under stress," notes the Repoflow report. At 64-thread concurrency:
- MinIO maintained DELETE latency below 10ms
- Ceph RGW latency spiked to 150+ ms
- SeaweedFS showed erratic 99th-percentile spikes

These variations prove critical for latency-sensitive applications like real-time analytics pipelines where consistent performance matters more than theoretical peaks.

Practical Implications

For engineering teams:
1. AI/ML workloads demanding high-throughput writes should prioritize MinIO or SeaweedFS
2. Large-scale archives benefit from Ceph's proven resilience despite performance tradeoffs
3. Dynamic environments with frequent object churn require MinIO's DELETE optimization

The benchmarks expose an uncomfortable truth: S3 compatibility ≠ performance parity. As one infrastructure architect commented: "Choosing based solely on API compliance risks deploying a storage system that buckles under actual production loads."

With object storage becoming the backbone of modern data platforms, these performance characteristics directly impact application responsiveness and infrastructure costs. Teams must now weigh architectural simplicity against the nuanced performance profiles revealed in these tests—because in the world of petabyte-scale data, even minor efficiency gaps compound into massive operational burdens.

Source: Repoflow Benchmarking Study