I have data stored in Table Storage. When I try to retrieve the data I do this using the partition key and row key. I have been doing some timings to retrieve data of around 8000 bytes.
I'm getting times ranging from 500-700ms and YES my host and storage are in the same data center.
Is Table Storage really so slow or am I doing something very wrong. I was expecting access times to be more like 50ms. Bear in mind that all of my tables added together probably only hold 200 rows.
Your performance numbers certainly sound very poor - and much worse than I've seen.
There are some useful reference numbers - and some good advice - on the storage team blog - see http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2010/11/06/how-to-get-most-out-of-windows-azure-tables.aspx
For your specific problem, I suggest writing some very simple test code to measure your numbers again - if you are still seeing the same problems, then post the code here and - if your code really is trivial - then contact MS support.
Are you trying to retrieve multiple entities at once? If so, there is a known bug in the query parser of the Table Storage, and indexes does not get used when multiple entities are queried directly from their RowKey, instead the request generate a linear scan of the table which can indeed take 500 to 700ms for each roundtrip.
