project mercury

I am trying to install project mercury on the recommend AWS Lucid AMI ami-3202f25b.

I am following the instructions from the step-by-step guide exactly, found at: http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268 .

When I get to step 3 and the: sudo bcfg2-admin init command is run and filled out, I receive the following error:

sudo bcfg2-admin init
Store Bcfg2 configuration in [/etc/bcfg2.conf]:
Location of Bcfg2 repository [/var/lib/bcfg2]:
Directory /var/lib/bcfg2 exists. Overwrite? [y/N]:y

I felt like it might be a good idea to post some news about upcoming PANTHEON development for those of you who are curious where the project is headed next. We've been a bit quiet over the past few weeks as we prepare for the commercial release of our Mercury on-demand product (live by DrupalCon or bust!) and evaluate the next steps for the platform. This post should give you some insight into what we're tracking and where we are headed.

Your feedback on any of these points is humbly requested.

Short Term

I'm going to try to get Aegir working with Project Mercury. Just wondering if anyone else with past experience would like to collaborate on some best practices and perhaps getting those into a wiki with me?

Just going to start collecting bits here:

Resources

Mercury 1.0 Install Wiki
• http://groups.drupal.org/node/50408

Discussion about Mercury + Aegir
• http://groups.drupal.org/node/35984

Aegir Install Instructions
• http://git.aegirproject.org/?p=provision.git;a=blob_plain;f=INSTALL.txt;...

It's been nine months and over a thousand developer hours, but it's finally here: Project Mercury has gone 1.0. Thanks to everyone for making this possible, and to my colleague Greg for doing so much leg-work over the past month to get things ready.

Help us spread the word on the twitter and if you're so inclined, take a short user survey. Install instructions below the fold.

Hey everyone. Mercury 1.0 is almost ready, and we could really use some help testing things out. As Greg posted, Mercury 1.0RC is on Amazon, and the self install instructions have been updated. The more eyes on it before we call it 1.0 official the better, so if you've been waiting to give it a test-drive, now is the time. We're going to be able to deliver fixes via BCFG2 (which is frackin' awesome), but a bug-free initial release state would be ideal.

Report bugs on Launchpad, post comments and responses on this thread here.

Also, if you are already using Mercury, you can help us plan for the future by taking this quick survey. Eight questions only!

An FYI. I will be investigating creation of the Project Mercury environment on an OpenSolaris 2009.06 AMI, with the goal of publishing that AMI in the next month or two. Starting with joshk's excellent step-by-step on Jaunty, I hope to reproduce all these pieces in OSOL over the next few weeks. Comments? Things to watch out for? Look for a writeup here as I go...

While Mercury has previously demonstrated the raw power of Varnish to radically accelerate the delivery of cached pages with Pressflow, that's only part of the battle for high performance Drupal. Cached pages need to be generated at least once, and logged in users will be bypassing Varnish when making requests. While it's nice to know you're covered for massive traffic spikes, what about baseline load?

Well, we want to answer that question too. Keep in mind that depending on your module/theme stack, your mileage may vary. A lot. Performance tuning a complex Drupal site for logged-in traffic requires sustained diligence at the application level — code profiling, slow query log review, innovative app-specific caches, etc — as well as hardware and system optimization. However, to set some baseline expectations, we used Jacob Singh's greate starter test suite and checked out a Mercury install on a 512MB Slicehost VPS. The results are quite encouraging.

Mercury 0.71-Beta has been released with small bugfixes (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/projectmercury for details).

AMI IDs are:

US 32-bit: ami-bd7c9fd4 - chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-0.71-Beta.manifest.xml
US 64-bit: ami-b17c9fd8 - chapter3-storage/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury64-0.71-Beta.manifest.xml
EU 32-bit: ami-8f2c07fb - chapter3-storage-europe/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury-0.71-Beta.manifest.xml
EU 64-bit: ami-73230807 - chapter3-storage-europe/PANTHEON-pressflow-mercury64-0.71-Beta.manifest.xml

With great pride, and after six alpha-level releases, I'm announcing of our seventh iteration on the Project Mercury stack, finally baked enough to call "beta".

At this point, we know that many people are using the Mercury EC2 image in production environments, and we've tuned this release conservatively to prevent it from breaking down under heavy load. We've also verified that the stack will work under a resource-constrained VPS (e.g. one with 1/4th the RAM of a small EC2 image), which gives us more confident that this configuration is stable. We also have a kickass logo:

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.