title: Azure Append Blobs Slow Read Performance
body: <p>I have observed that reading from Azure Append Blob is very slow when a blob is appended to a few thousand times or more. Writing/appending is fast, but reading a typical log blob with a few thousand appends each of size a few KB, for total size of a few MB takes more than a minute! Reading standard blog or page blob of similar size takes milliseconds. Is there some way to speed up reading from append blob, i.e. by flattening internal structure?</p>
  
  <p>So far it looks like that it may be best to periodically "archive" / convert append blobs to block blobs, and then process them. Any suggestion?</p>
  
  <p>If not, what would be recommended alternative storage for logs?
  Azure table can be used, but it would take many more reads, even when bulk operations are used. </p>