I'm working on a medium-sized web application written in PHP that's running on a VPS with 512mb ram. The webapp hasn't been officially launched yet, so there isn't too much traffic going on, just me and a few other people working on it.

There is another slightly smaller webapp also hosted on this machine, among 4-5 other small static sites.

We are running Centos 5 32-bit & cPanel/WHM.

This is the result of running ps aux and, as you can see, it's not using 100% of the RAM. However, on the hypanel overview, it's always shown as using aroun 500MB ram, just for running apache, mysql, and the lowest-memory-footprint versions of the mail server, ftp server etc.

-bash-3.2# ps aux
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root         1  0.0  0.0   2156   664 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 init [3]
root      1123  0.0  0.0   2260   548 ?        S<s  12:08   0:00 /sbin/udevd -d
root      1462  0.0  0.0   1812   568 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 syslogd -m 0
named     1496  0.0  0.0   3808   820 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 nsd
named     1497  0.0  0.0  10672   756 ?        S    12:08   0:00 nsd
named     1499  0.0  0.0   3880   584 ?        S    12:08   0:00 nsd
root      1514  0.0  0.1   7240  1064 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
root      1522  0.0  0.0   2832   832 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 xinetd -stayalive -pidfile /var/run/xinetd.pid
root      1534  0.0  0.1   3712  1328 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /bin/sh /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=/var/lib/mysql -
mysql     1667  0.0  2.9 225680 30884 ?        Sl   12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/mysqld --basedir=/ --datadir=/var/lib/mysql -
mailnull  1766  0.0  0.1   9352  1100 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/exim -bd -q60m
root      1797  0.0  0.0   2156   708 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/dovecot
root      1798  0.0  0.0   2632  1012 ?        S    12:08   0:00 dovecot-auth
root      1816  0.0  3.0  38580 32456 ?        Ss   12:08   0:01 /usr/local/bin/spamd -d --allowed-ips=127.0.0.1 --pidfi
root      1839  0.0  1.6  63200 17496 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
root      1846  0.0  0.1   5416  1468 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 pure-ftpd (SERVER)
root      1848  0.0  0.1   6212  1244 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/pure-authd -s /var/run/ftpd.sock -r /usr/sbin
root      1856  0.0  0.1   4492  1112 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 crond
root      1864  0.0  0.0   2356   428 ?        Ss   12:08   0:00 /usr/sbin/atd
dovecot   1927  0.0  0.1   5196  1952 ?        S    12:08   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   1928  0.0  0.1   5196  1948 ?        S    12:08   0:00 pop3-login
dovecot   1929  0.0  0.1   5316  2012 ?        S    12:08   0:00 imap-login
dovecot   1930  0.0  0.2   5416  2228 ?        S    12:08   0:00 imap-login
root      1939  0.0  0.1   3936  1964 ?        S    12:08   0:00 cPhulkd - processor
root      1963  0.0  0.8  15876  8564 ?        S    12:08   0:00 cpsrvd (SSL) - waiting for connections
root      1966  0.0  0.7  15172  7748 ?        S    12:08   0:00 cpdavd - accepting connections on 2077 and 2078
root      1990  0.0  0.2   5008  3136 ?        S    12:08   0:00 queueprocd - wait to process a task
root      2017  0.0  2.9  38580 31020 ?        S    12:08   0:00 spamd child
root      2018  0.0  0.5   8904  5636 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /usr/bin/perl /usr/local/cpanel/bin/leechprotect
nobody    2021  0.0  3.2  66512 33724 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    2022  0.0  3.1  67812 33024 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    2024  0.0  1.9  64364 20680 ?        S    12:08   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
root      2027  0.0  0.4   9000  4540 ?        S    12:08   0:00 tailwatchd
root      2032  0.0  0.1   4176  1836 ?        SN   12:08   0:00 cpanellogd - sleeping for logs
nobody    3096  0.0  1.9  64572 20264 ?        S    12:09   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    3097  0.0  2.8  66008 30136 ?        S    12:09   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    3098  0.0  2.8  65704 29752 ?        S    12:09   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    3099  0.0  3.1  67260 32816 ?        S    12:09   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
andrei    3448  0.0  0.1   3204  1632 ?        S    12:50   0:00 imap
nobody    3537  0.0  1.9  64308 20108 ?        S    13:01   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    3614  0.0  1.9  64576 20628 ?        S    13:10   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
nobody    3615  0.0  1.3  63200 14672 ?        S    13:10   0:00 /usr/local/apache/bin/httpd -k start -DSSL
root      3626  0.0  0.2  10232  2964 ?        Rs   13:14   0:00 sshd: root@pts/0
root      3648  0.0  0.1   3844  1600 pts/0    Ss   13:14   0:00 -bash
root      3826  0.0  0.0   2532   908 pts/0    R+   13:21   0:00 ps aux

Lately, without any significant changes to the configuration, the memory usage started peaking and going over 512, causing the virtual server to kill apache, basically murdering our site in the process.

Do you have any idea if this is normal and more resources should be acquired? I don't think... since there isn't too much data or traffic online yet.