Initial Mercury Results From 512MB VPS deploy

Just a heads up; as we move towards more and more stable builds of the Mercury stack, we are starting to look at deploying it on other infrastructure besides EC2. This week, we set it up and tuned for a modest (512MB of ram) VPS. These tests were successful. We were able to simulate a mix of non-cached traffic along side the simple ApacheBench battering, and the system held up well, even without gigabytes of ram to support it.

This is an important milestone, because it proves that our stack is deployable and can provide value in more resource constrained environments, which paves the way for people to use it in lower-cost configurations than EC2.

The next step is to start using Jacob Singh's fantastic performance testing suite to generate baseline benchmarks. We will do this in a number of different environments, as well as in a bare-metal setup, and post the results.

We're expecting a beta build within the next few weeks. I'm still open to more suggestions for more bundled features (e.g. we'll be including Drush) and performance enhancements (e.g. we'll be using innodb as the default database engine), as well as other open cloud providers where you'd like to see Mercury available. We'll be packaging for VMware and Rackspace Cloud at a minimum, but if there are other good places, let us know!