Amazon S3 learning with HTTPS serving very slow

On our site we have lots of images thumbnail getting served on HTTPS by Amazon S3. We were seeing very high load time in browsers upto 2-3 sec for approx 40-50KB size.

We tried following load test on S3 and the results helped us making decision.

Conclusion:

1. Serving S3 content over HTTPS is slow
2. S3 performance is not effected (does not degred by # of objects in bucket
3. Using CloudFront to serve S3 content over HTTPS gives significant improvement in time