Josh Huckabee

If you're not using the InnoDB engine in your MySQL databases, make sure its disabled in your my.conf by uncommenting or adding the skip-innodb directive. This simple change can free up some precious resources since MySQL is now only required to start up one engine.

Before I turned off the InnoDB engine my memory footprint looked like this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1022       1012         10          0        133        673
-/+ buffers/cache:        205        817
Swap:         2047          0       2047

After I turned off InnoDB an restarted MySQL...

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1022        982         39          0        133        676
-/+ buffers/cache:        172        849
Swap:         2047          0       2047

That small change saved me 33MB of memory. Thats about 3% of the 1GB I have on my small VPS.