Hello everyone,

I have a couple of Linodes, a 1GB and a 2GB, each running a WordPress install.

Its a complete overkill for what I need as I barely get any traffic, but I like playing around with them all the same.

I'm a little confused about how to manage the memory of my Linodes, how much to assign to what and where to do it.

Can anyone point me in the direction of any documentation that shows how best to deal with memory?

Are there memory settings that are considered best practice for WordPress?

Here is my current memory usage:

Here is the free -m for my 1GB linode

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 989 932 56 0 20 355
-/+ buffers/cache: 556 433
Swap: 255 60 195

I have APC running on the above Linode so that I can use opcode caching withing the w3 cache plugin.

Here is the free -m for my 2GB linode

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1995 1466 528 0 137 463
-/+ buffers/cache: 865 1129
Swap: 255 0 255

Why are you concerned specifically about memory? Is your site slow, or do you just want to eek out all the performance possible? If you don't know what your page load times are like, then figuring that out is the first step so you have a baseline to work with. I recommend NewRelic, since it's really easy to use and gives you a ton of information.

Anyway, to actually answer your question, if you have APC running and no OOM memory problems, then you're pretty close to optimal when it comes to the PHP level. I'd look at the web server (Apache/Nginx) level instead. Adding more workers (e.g. if you use Apache prefork) often gives a boost in throughput, though you're not likely to notice that with a low-traffic site.