I'm relatively new to server issues, having a site of mine that I started early in the year grow beyond my capabilities of managing it. I need help.

I recently moved out of my shared hosting environment onto a dedicated virtual server from Mediatemple.

Each week, I run a script that fetches data from my DB, fetches data from last.fm's API and then tweets information to Twitter.

My server uses Virtuozzo and when the script runs, Apache crashes every 5min. I checked and saw that the 'kmemsize' parameter reaches its cap (its 13mb).

I realise my problem. The MySQL process stays open for long while Apache needs to handle lots of incoming links (about 200 000 pageviews for that day according to my previous host's AWSTATS). Yes, I'm quite unexperienced in this, and I'm clearly killing the server with too many incoming links while it has to manage the updating of the DB.

So that is the precedent: I want a few answers.

1) Why did my shared hosting environment not crash apache every 5min? It ran fine, the site only slowed a lot. Clearly, it must be the virtual container and the kmemsize limit?

2) Where do I go from here? Would a physical server (not a virtual container) encounter the same problems?

I sent a support request to Mediatemple as well. I need all the help I can get.