Thanks for the reply, Rick.

I should have mentioned that I run on a VPS, so I'm able to tune both mysqld and httpd. So far, I've only been attempting to tune httpd because, well, that's what keeps dying due to my VPS hitting it's resource limits.

My VPS plan is on 384 MB RAM, so I guess I don't have acres of room to work with, but I figured it should be enough for what I'm hosting.

I ran mysqltuner.pl and received the following:

# ./mysqltuner.pl

>> MySQLTuner 1.0.0 - Major Hayden <major@mhtx.net>
>> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/
>> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering
Please enter your MySQL administrative login: virtuafi_forums
Please enter your MySQL administrative password:

-------- General Statistics --------------------------------------------------
[--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script
[!!] Your MySQL version 4.1.22-standard is EOL software! Upgrade soon!
[OK] Operating on 32-bit architecture with less than 2GB RAM

-------- Storage Engine Statistics -------------------------------------------
[--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster
[--] Data in MyISAM tables: 365M (Tables: 63)
[--] Data in HEAP tables: 2M (Tables: 2)
[!!] InnoDB is enabled but isn't being used
[!!] Total fragmented tables: 2

-------- Performance Metrics -------------------------------------------------
[--] Up for: 7h 3m 20s (151K q [5.970 qps], 14K conn, TX: 423M, RX: 36M)
[--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32%
[--] Total buffers: 98.0M global + 12.2M per thread (200 max threads)
[!!] Allocating > 2GB RAM on 32-bit systems can cause system instability
[!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 2.5G (248% of installed RAM)
[OK] Slow queries: 0% (3/151K)
[OK] Highest usage of available connections: 3% (7/200)
[!!] None of your MyISAM tables are indexed - add indexes immediately
[OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.6% (71K cached / 107K selects)
[OK] Query cache prunes per day: 0
[OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 11K sorts)
[OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 0% (13 on disk / 7K total)
[OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (7 created / 14K connections)
[OK] Table cache hit rate: 88% (237 open / 268 opened)
[OK] Open file limit used: 7% (457/6K)
[OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (72K immediate / 72K locks)

-------- Recommendations -----------------------------------------------------
General recommendations:
Add skip-innodb to MySQL configuration to disable InnoDB
Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance
MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate
Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries
All tables have been optimised except for the two HEAP tables. The MySQL server had been restarted with the last 24 hrs due to a mandatory/scheduled server reboot by my provider. The only other recommendation is the 'skip-innodb' option, but I have no idea what this is for, nor of any benefits to be gained?

Right now on my system, running top and sorting by the RES column I get:

Code
top - 06:52:36 up  7:30,  1 user,  load average: 0.16, 0.47, 0.48
Tasks:  57 total,   2 running,  55 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0% us,  0.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 100.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   1048576k total,   311264k used,   737312k free,        0k buffers
Swap:        0k total,        0k used,        0k free,        0k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 7725 root      16   0 84056  69m  656 S  0.0  6.8   0:07.48 clamd
30613 mysql     15   0  175m  36m 3628 S  0.0  3.6   7:21.70 mysqld
26021 root      16   0 26756  23m 2080 S  0.0  2.3   0:02.03 spamd
 9977 root      16   0 26756  22m 1040 S  0.0  2.2   0:00.00 spamd
 8031 nobody    15   0 28228  19m 2844 S  0.0  1.9   1:28.50 httpd
 8028 nobody    16   0 27600  18m 2848 S  0.0  1.8   1:45.11 httpd
 8154 nobody    16   0 26028  17m 3408 S  0.0  1.7   1:30.74 httpd
 8034 nobody    15   0 25864  17m 3412 S  0.0  1.7   1:08.40 httpd
 9850 nobody    16   0 26176  17m 2836 S  0.0  1.7   1:03.42 httpd
 8072 nobody    15   0 26112  17m 2828 S  0.0  1.7   1:18.70 httpd
24265 nobody    15   0 26000  17m 2828 S  0.0  1.7   0:52.91 httpd
13923 nobody    16   0 25804  17m 2840 S  0.0  1.7   1:31.25 httpd
 8033 nobody    15   0 25900  17m 2828 S  0.0  1.7   1:34.18 httpd
 6107 nobody    15   0 22140  12m 2404 S  0.0  1.3   0:10.82 httpd
As you can, the big hitters are the httpd processes. I'm still new to the world of apache tuning, so I don't know if an average of 17m for each httpd process screams BLOATED to anyone or not.

For what it's worth, here are my key httpd.conf settings:

Timeout 40
KeepAlive On
MaxKeepAliveRequests 200
KeepAliveTimeout 5
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 10
StartServers 5
MaxClients 90
MaxRequestsPerChild 1000
There isn't a whole lot of science behind these numbers. They're a result of my reading numerous guides and trial-and-error. I wish I knew what I should be aiming for, but I don't. If you need to know a bit more about my site and the (small) traffic I get, then let me know although I fear that I've overwhelmed this post with enough details already!

But getting back to MySQL, here are the mysqld settings from my.cnf:

[mysqld]
skip-locking
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets/
query_cache_limit=3M
query_cache_size=48M
query_cache_type=1
max_user_connections=20
max_connections=200
interactive_timeout=60
wait_timeout=30
connect_timeout=10
thread_cache_size=384
thread_concurrency=2
key_buffer=24M
join_buffer=3M
max_allowed_packet=32M
table_cache=3096
record_buffer=3M
sort_buffer_size=3096K
read_buffer_size=3096K
max_connect_errors=10
read_rnd_buffer_size=3096K
myisam_sort_buffer_size=48M
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

I'm probably guessing all of this is above and beyond the regular call for assistance, but thought I'd throw it out there anyways and hope for some help!? smile