I noticed my server was sluggish. I ssh'd into it just in time to see some out of memory errors and notice my top was loaded with apache children. My ssh termin

I noticed my server was sluggish. I ssh'd into it just in time to see some out of memory errors and notice my top was loaded with apache children. My ssh terminal became unresponsive. I went to the slicehost chatroom and said "uh oh" and they told me to use their local web-based console. It got me to the machine just in time to see an endless loop of 'out of memory' spam. They told me I was swapping like crazy and having memory problems. They asked me about my mysql/apache config. As per their suggestion, I rebooting the machine to try to get into apache and lower the number of children, and the machine crashed after reboot before I could do anything, with more out of memory spam. They suggested the best next step was to do an upgrade on the slice from 256 to 512, which I did. It took about 10 minutes. It's prorated, so I only pay the higher price for the amount of time I'm at 512. Once I upgraded, the machine was stable enough for me to re-enable caching. Now that the crisis was averted, all the extra apache threads died off, and my machine went back to normal. They gave me a bunch of links showing how to more properly configure apache/mysql for low-ram VPSs.