So I had a Linode 1024 with LEMP Ran a bunch of small wordpress sites on there. They don't get much traffic on each one but it has been running great.

I decided to set up another Linode 1024 and install ISPCONFIG on there. I notice all of the sites that has a mysql would display ERROR CONNECTING TO DATABASE FREQUENTLY....so I would have to restart the mysql on the SSH. Something it causing the Mysql server to crash. Can someone help me determine what the cause of this is? It ran just fine on the other Linode. The main difference is the ISPCONFIG...possibly taking up too much memory and crashing?

By looking at longview: avg memory that clamav utilizes is is 292MB....looks like I should be disabling that?

I have been running ISPConfig for quite some time. ISPConfig itself doesn't really take up much memory. It just runs as a virtualhost in your web server and a cron runs every minute to write updates to your config files and check to make sure your services are running. If you followed the install for ISPConfig and installed ClamAV and Spamassassin then that could be where your problem is. I can't remember which one took up all of the memory because I've offloaded all my email to Google Apps. It is possible that MySQL is running out of memory and crashing. It's probably not ISPConfig's fault, but it may be one of the programs that you installed with it. I can't remember anymore what will happen if you just disable ClamAV, you might have to change some Postfix settings or email might break.

What OS are you using? What do the MySQL logs say? Also, ISPConfig should be monitoring your services during its cron run to see if they are running and restart them if they aren't. You can check that under System -> Server Config -> <Your server> -> Rescue. If MySQL is OOMing though, ISPConfig may not be able to rescue it. It may just crash on restart.

What does 'free -m' show you on the command line?

There was another ISPConfig-running-out-of-RAM-and-crashing-MySQL thread here a couple of weeks ago. It was also caused by ClamAV gobbling up all the memory and leaving no space for MySQL to run.

You don't need ClamAV, SpamAssassin, or any other POP3/IMAP related software (such as Dovecot) if you don't plan to receive email at your server. You also can't afford running unnecessary programs on a small server like a Linode 1GB. Disable anything that isn't strictly necessary.

Thank you so much for reponses!
OS: Debian 8.1

free -m shows:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 987 852 135 131 12 254
-/+ buffers/cache: 585 402
Swap: 255 255 0

So I've enabled service monitoring and restart on failure.
How do I view Mysql logs? I know it's located: /var/log/mysql.log

Spam assassin is disabled. I'm only running ClamAV (which looks like to be eating memory).
Each of my domains I like to catchall forward it to my google apps email.
1) Do I still need the email server setup just to catchall forward?
2) Or do I need to upgrade to the 2GB linode?

I appreciate your responses! Thank you!

You'll need to upgrade if you want to keep ClamAV. It's using too much of your RAM, leaving too little for your website and database.

If you're not really checking for spam before forwarding emails to your Google account, there might not be much point scanning for viruses, either. Either Google or your antivirus will probably let you know if you get an infected email. See if you can disable ClamAV and thereby save some $$$.

If possible, just make all emails go directly to Google instead of through your server. I thought Google Apps supported doing that?

Google Apps now cost money $50 per year (per user, per domain).....
I subscribed to one domain and plan to forward the rest to it.

I think I'll disable ClamAV for now and see if that helps. Thanks.