We are running an Azure App Service and using the Standard Azure Storage Account (general purpose v2) to store images, video, pdfs, etc. We are using the Azure.Storage.Blobs library in our Azure App Service to upload the files to our Standard Azure Storage Account. The upload times seem slow for the size of the files and I haven't found any way on our Standard Azure Storage to scale up and improve the performance. I am wondering if our Azure App Service will work with a Premium Azure Storage Account, I have read a few things that make me think that the Premium Azure Storage Account will only work with an application running on a Azure VM. Does anyone how to improve performance on a Standard Azure Storage Account? Does anyone know if a Premium Azure Storage Account will work with Azure App Service via the Azure.Storage.Blobs library? Thank you! J

Yes it will work. You can reach out via the SDK to premium block storage https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-block-blob-premium (page storage is more usually used for VM disks etc) Whether you need to go that way or not depends on a lot of factors The best practices and considerations are discussed here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-performance-checklist Two top of mind things to look at: There could be some inefficiency in the wat you're persisting the content - and/or you may be hitting transaction/IOPS limits - this can be true for highly concurrent apps/scale out

Azure App Service and Azure Premium Storage Account

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Ben Gimblett 4,330 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-02-16T17:06:16.45+00:00

Yes it will work.
You can reach out via the SDK to premium block storage https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-block-blob-premium
(page storage is more usually used for VM disks etc)

Whether you need to go that way or not depends on a lot of factors
The best practices and considerations are discussed here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-performance-checklist

Two top of mind things to look at:
There could be some inefficiency in the wat you're persisting the content - and/or you may be hitting transaction/IOPS limits - this can be true for highly concurrent apps/scale out
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J Allen 45 Reputation points

2024-02-27T23:31:38.0233333+00:00

Thank you again @Ben Gimblett I was able to create a premium block blob storage account and have been working to optimize my code that is using the SDK but I am still getting very slow uploads from my published Azure App Service. My app service and the premium block blob storage account are both running in the central region. The only traffic is from myself as the site/storage account is in testing.When running the code locally I can upload files to both a standard storage account and the premium storage account in 1-2 seconds for a 100 kb file. When I publish the code to the azure app service it can take anywhere between 30-50 seconds for the same file. Here is what I have tried without any improvement.

Created a virtual network and added the app service and storage account to it. Not a 100% I did everything correctly on this maybe I missed something....

Tried scaling the app service plan to Premium v3 P1V3. The site was much faster but uploads were still the same speed.

I am fairly new to azure and at a lost on what to try. Has anyone else seen this? Or does anyone have any ideas on things to check?

Thanks,

Jeremy

Ben Gimblett 4,330 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-02-28T09:59:06.48+00:00

Hi - This does sound very strange. If I understand correctly if you spin up the website locally and upload to the storage account it's performant (I'm assuming you are working either in an office or at home, so your "local" machine is not running in Az?)
And when you publish it's significantly slower (where the web app is in the same DC)
In this case it's unlikely to be the code - as you've proved that can work. And it wont be the storage account which is fast. I can see one or two community posts with similar observations of very long file upload times from code running in App service towards storage - I think this may be something you need to contact the support folks to dig into this further and help you ascertain the root cause

J Allen 45 Reputation points

2024-02-29T03:01:59.2666667+00:00

Thank you @Ben Gimblett Yes, that is correct, running the site locally from visual studio at home. Got it, I will proceed down that route.

Ben Gimblett 4,330 Reputation points Microsoft Employee

2024-02-29T10:39:48.76+00:00

One last comment

App Service platform has a wizard and plugins which back onto some of the same data support use https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview-diagnostics

From your comments it sounds like there's not too much site usage, although you dont say what else is running on the plan (ASP), but in any case it would be worth checking here to see if there are any issues which are not otherwise apparent whilst you follow the support route

This tool will allow you to check more deeply into memory, cpu and socket utilization , etc etc

Hypothetically (we dont know of course!) the issue you describe could be a delay in starting the write operation rather than latency with it ... Your app service code is running on a VM worker within a sandbox
but in the end it's a process running on the VM so it's sensitive to other conditions on the VM (resource constraints etc)

In terms of networking, by default PaaS to PaaS (here App Service to storage) uses the MS backbone and will route efficiently within the DC on the SDN
You dont need to use VNET integration from App Service unless you want to control the traffic or you want to access storage via a storage account private endpoint. I understand you were experiencing the issue with or without vnet integration so that should not be a factor in any case.

TP 90,556 Reputation points

2024-02-29T14:43:23.79+00:00

Hi Jeremy,

Do you have a minimum reproducible code example for this issue? If yes I could attempt to reproduce it.

Can you describe a bit more about the workflow? For example, you mention uploading file to storage. Where does the file originate immediately beforehand? Is it already on your app service storage, or does the user upload from their local PC to app service, then app service uploads to blob storage?

When you perform the upload to Azure Storage account, what number are you seeing for Success E2E Latency metric? If this number is relatively low you know the issue is on app service side and not the storage account. Just had someone else with similar issue and storage was performing well.

J Allen 45 Reputation points

2024-03-01T14:48:03.5633333+00:00

Thank you @Ben Gimblett and TP.

After digging deeper into this issue it appears my local environment and the azure environment was not a true apples to apples test. The app allows a user to pick images to upload and then resizes the images and sends them on to the storage container. Running locally I could select large MB image files, resize them to KB size files and send them to the storage container within a few seconds. I assumed and mistakenly thought the user selected images were being resized on the client by the upload component we are using prior to sending them to the storage container but the component is actually sending the original MB size images to the server, then resizing them on the server and then sending the resized images to the storage container. Hence why running locally was fast but running the same code in azure from my home with lousy internet upload speeds was painfully slow.

The good news is that once the files are uploaded to the app running in the app service and then sending them over to the storage container in the same DC seems to be pretty quick (not sure if we actually need to use the premium drive or not, thinking we may be able to just use the standard storage). Sorry for missing this, I feel like I should have noticed this much sooner! I really appreciate all of your help and hopefully I didn't waste too much of your time!

Thanks!

TP 90,556 Reputation points

2024-03-01T16:22:00.43+00:00

That's awesome you got it figured out. Really appreciate you following up and explaining the details of what was happening. I agree you could probably use standard account.
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