SimpleDB query performance improvement using boto
I have had the same issue as you Charlie. After profiling the code, I have narrowed the performance problem down to SSL. It seems like that is where it is spending most of it's time and hence CPU cycles.
I have read of a problem in the httplib library (which boto uses for SSL) where the performance doesn't increase unless the packets are over a certain size, though that was for Python 2.5 and may have already been fixed.
I am trying to use the SimpleDB in following way. 
I want to keep 48 hrs worth data at anytime into simpledb and query it for different purposes. 
Each domain has 1 hr worth data, so at any time there are 48 domains present in the simpledb.
As the new data is constantly uploaded, I delete the oldest domain and create a new domain for each new hour.
Each domain is about 50MB in size, the total size of all the domains is around 2.2 GB.
The item in the domain has following type of attributes
identifier - around 50 characters long  -- 1 per item
timestamp - timestamp value -- 1 per item
serial_n_data - 500-1000 bytes data -- 200 per item 
I'm using python boto library to upload and query the data. 
I send 1 item/sec with around 200 attributes in the domain.
For one of the application of this data, I need to get all the data from all the 48 domains. 
The Query looks like, "SELECT * FROM domain", for all the domains.
I use 8 threads to query data with each thread taking responsibility of few domains.
e.g domain 1-6 thread 1
    domain 7-12 thread 2 and so on   
It takes close to 13 minutes to get the entire data.I am using boto's select method for this.I need much more faster performance than this. Any suggestions on speed up the querying process? Is there any other language that I can use, which can speed up the things?