Performance questions are common on Amazon EC2 environments because it is a shared environment. You will not see the same throughput as a dedicated server. In terms of running tests on EC2, run them several times for the same reason (i.e., it's a shared environment and you don't know what else is happening on the server).

If you are running on EC2 and post performance questions on the dist-list, please state this fact up-front that because EC2 issues are practically a separate class of performance issues.