[chuhnk]

Summary: Reduce memory by running less processes

Use the right tools for the job I think. If you've got a vps with 256-512mb do not run heavy process forking applications when something else has been written exactly for this situation. I'm a big believer in apache, I think its great with mpm worker or event but prefork is really inefficient and in my opinion a legacy mpm. Unless you truly need apache (in our case custom written modules) then switch to lighttpd or nginx. These are proven to be extremely fast, highly configurable and low in memory usage.

I havent found an alternative to spamassassin but that thing consumes far too much memory and cpu than I like. If you find something else, use it. Its been around for a lifetime and someone needs to come out with a new solution.

If you have free or cached memory and think the kernel is swapping out your process then set a value between 0 and 100 in /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. 100 more likely to swap.

Here is another thing, look at whats running. The OS brings up alot of unneeded processes, stuff that you'll probably never use. Do ps aux and check it out. Or top and reorder by mem usage.