New Linode StackScript: Pantheon Mercury (High Performance Drupal in 10 Minutes or Less)

published on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 20:03

For those who might not know, Pantheon Mercury is:

... a drop-in replacement for your Drupal website hosting service that delivers break-through performance. Mercury can serve two-hundred times more pages per second and generate pages three times faster than standard hosting services.

Mercury achieves this by using open-source technologies like so many ingredients of a complex dish - a little Varnish here, a dash of Memcached there, a hint of the Alternative PHP Cache, a healthy dose of Tomcat and Solr, all based upon the Pressflow distribution of Drupal. None of it is anything you couldn't do yourself -- many before Chapter Three had done it actually. However, they were the first to tie it all together using BCFG2, and release an Amazon EC2 AMI image of it.

As word spread, many liked the idea of Mercury, but wanted to brew their own non-EC2 instance. While they posted a wiki article on how to do it yourself, they went to work on native support for RackSpace. When I read Josh Koenig's post on the Linode blog stating he wanted to bring Mercury to Linode, I made a mental note. Some time passed, I became much more involved in Drupal, and I decided to volunteer to write the StackScript. Josh said okay, and put me in touch with Greg Coit, their resident sysadmin, and we went to work.

Fast forward a couple weeks, and we've announced a beta! The StackScript is quite complete - it supports Ubuntu Jaunty and Karmic, and can use the current stable branch or the soon-to-be-released 1.1 development branch. Once Lucid is released, we'll test to make sure it works there as well.

I want to thank Greg for all his help. We found some bugs in Ubuntu, some quirks in the memcached init script, and fixed many bugs and added some features to their BCFG2 bazaar repo. Thanks also go out to Josh for his oversight and guidance. It was a great time, a great learning experience, and I came out of it with some new colleagues (and some free beers at DrupalConSF).

Feel free to read up on my experiences with Linode, and if you like what you see, click on one of the many links to Linode from my blog. If you sign up and stay a customer for 90 days (trust me, you will), I'll get $20 credited to my account. Feel free to comment below about the StackScript and let me know about any issues you might find.

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 01:15

Do you have plans to release a Debian StackScript?

Submitted by justintime on Wed, 04/14/2010 - 07:55

I'll plan on supporting whatever Mercury supports - right now that's just Ubuntu Jaunty, Karmic, and very soon Lucid.

Submitted by bcj (not verified) on Fri, 04/23/2010 - 11:45

Thanks for doing this, checking it out now. Does this stackscript optimize based on the memory of the Linode?

Submitted by Justin Ellison on Fri, 04/23/2010 - 12:13

Short answer: yes it does.

Long answer: technically, the stackscript doesn't, but bcfg2 does, and bcfg2 is installed and configured by the stackscript.

Enjoy - let me know how it works for you. How big of a Linode is this instance on? I tested on a 540, that's as small as you should go.

Submitted by bcj (not verified) on Fri, 04/23/2010 - 12:23

I have it running on a 720. I currently have 3 Linode 360s running which I will collapse into the one 720. (All very low usage sites) I do have a larger site on a 1440 running a Mercury which I rolled as my own and will likely move over to this as I am still green with Drupal! Take care, B

Submitted by marco (not verified) on Fri, 01/21/2011 - 18:48

I used the stackscript and after it built, the server would not let me ssh into it. Can anyone give any step-by-step outline of how to use it?

Submitted by jday (not verified) on Sat, 02/19/2011 - 14:49

I've been trying to use the mercury stack scirpt and after several reboots and rebuilds still don't have it working. Make sure to have the the automount Devtempfs setting set to "No", that seems to at least get the script running but it seems to just hang after "restarting network management services"

has anyone got the stack to work?

Submitted by Mike (not verified) on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 15:07

I've used this on a few builds and I have to say thank you! Awesome work. However, the stackscript is no longer accessible on Linode to deploy, as they are moving up to only 10.04 LTS or above or something. Not really sure why. Anyway, on my newest Linode I can't even get to your script any more. I tried the other mercury stackscript in their list but it isn't quite right.

Hopefully you can provide an updated script that will work with new linodes. 

Submitted by justintime on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 15:39

See http://groups.drupal.org/node/138449 for updates.

Submitted by Mike (not verified) on Mon, 04/04/2011 - 15:44

Appreciate the quick response to that! Thanks again.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 08:13

Talked with Linode folks over the weekend and there was comment that http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view/?StackScriptID=353 was not ready for Ubuntu 10.04 Is that correct?

 

Thanks.

Submitted by justintime on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 14:14

I should have that script updated this week to work with 10.04.

Submitted by justintime on Mon, 05/09/2011 - 14:30

http://groups.drupal.org/node/147824

Submitted by Vladimir (not verified) on Sat, 06/25/2011 - 07:02

I'm not sure if it's the right place to paste this questio, but I don't know where to. As soon as I found the Mercury project over the net I was trying to find common hosting to be able to use it. Finally I found the Linode library with the StackScript. I've ran it and it gives me a preconfigured website, but what if I would need several websites on my hosting account as usual? I didn't find any answer if Pantheon can operate with any Web Control Panel like DirectAdmin/cPanel etc...

Could you please help me to understand better, maybe I shoul search for another solution?

Thank you.

Submitted by Justin (not verified) on Sun, 12/11/2011 - 22:37

Just thought I'd post an update -- the stackscript is now broken, and I don't see myself being able to repair it anytime soon.

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