I'm planning to deploy my ecomm+social network website based on Drupal here. The distro I'm using is Ubuntu 10.04.

So I was looking into how to do that, and I found this guide http://library.linode.com/application-s ... id#sph_id6 and this http://www.linode.com/stackscripts/view ... riptID=353 stackscript.

But then the Pantheon Mercury stackscript says right at the top

But the stackscript was just updated 3mths ago, has anyone used that script recently? Does it still work? Or if not, is the guide still current at least?

By the way, can someone recommend a good control panel for a LAP server like this (the database, the "M", will be on a different linode)? Or just plain old Webmin?

Cheers guys. Look forward to joining the ranks (racks)!

So I spent the day trying to install Drupal with Mercury with instructions here
http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268 and http://library.linode.com/application-s ... id#sph_id6

And I can firmly say that both of those are too outdated to be functional at this point. The instructions at http://groups.drupal.org/node/70268 are more up-to-date but are filled with too many errors to be functional either. I got so far as getting Hudson working but could never get it find the Mercury job.

For anyone looking to deploy Drupal here for a production site, my recommendation would be to deploy Drupal 7 with Pressflow, memcache, and drush. Install Varnish in front of apache2, and install Apachesolr for apache itself. And then forget about all that other Mercury stuff. Those parts that I mentioned makes up ~80% of a "Mercury installation" and probably as much performance benefits, without all the messy. This would be close to what they ask you to do in the Mercury guide in the linode library, but as I understand it, while the installation is similar, the configuration of each individual part would be different than a "true" Mercury setup.

It looks like this is where the Pantheon Mercury stuff is nowadays:

https://github.com/pantheon-systems/mercury

I get the impression that the open-source Mercury stack is no longer a major focus of Pantheon, and has been replaced with a service offering.

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Yea that's what I found as well. I was hoping the last updated release (Mercury 1.1 beta or something) was still functional, but that does not seem to be the case. It's a shame no one else took up maintaining Mercury though.

It seems that Mercury and pressflow (the version of Drupal that a mercury installation uses) are mainly to make up for shortcomings in Drupal 6, and most of them have already been addressed in D7. Even David Strauss, the chief maintainer for pressflow, recommend most people to use D7 instead of pressflow7.

In my sandbox I worked out D7 to work with varnish, solr, APC on apache tomcat, and it seems to be fine with the loads that I need. I would recommend everyone to go this route. Someone should take down the Mercury wiki's in the linode library.

What are u wanting to use Mercury for? Its all about the mercury profile and they set up things like varnish, memcache or cache routers not to hard to do for your self, and several walk thoughts, granted a walk though is not like hitting a button to install it all but I usually prefer to learn what im putting into the system so I know all the things running.

I'm personally starting to lean towards nginx + php-fpm + memcached + apc + percona mysql...

of course a bit of a learning curve with getting nginx to do all the things you need but not impossible.

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