I was able to reduce memory of mysqld on a 256MB VPS from 5.2% to 2.9% by adding this to /etc/my.cnf skip-bdb skip-innodb # default is 8M key_buffer_s

I was able to reduce memory of mysqld on a 256MB VPS from 5.2% to 2.9% by adding this to /etc/my.cnf skip-bdb skip-innodb # default is 8M key_buffer_size=4M