Kostya Vasilyev's software blog

My other site, http://www.aqua-mail.com is hosted in Xen virtual machine with 512 MB of RAM.

Of those 512, about 300 were taken by MySQL daemon, causing some swap use.

I was able to get MySQL down from 300 to about 60 megabytes of RAM by doing the following.

Most of my tables were already using MyISAM engine, but there was a couple using InnoDB.

1) Converted the remaining tables from InnoDB to MyISAM, by running this in the PhpMyAdmin SQL window:


ALTER TABLE table_name_here ENGINE=MyISAM;


2) Disabled InnoDB support by creating a new config file in /etc/mysql/conf.d, with this content:


[mysqld]
default-storage-engine = myisam
skip-innodb


The file can have any name you want, as long as it ends with “.cnf“.

3) Restarted MySQL:


service mysql restart


I’m sure InnoDB is a terrific engine, and Oracle had a very good reason for making it the default starting with MySQL 5.5.

However, for a low-memory VPS system, low-traffic web site, avoid swap should probably be a priority.