Free Up Resources on Your Drupal Web Server

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.