I am on Linode 512 using magento. It seems as certain functions dont work anymore from certain pages.

Update Shopping Cart button doesnt work
Cant add to cart from the product page
customer cant login
customer cant create account without buying anything

If you go to product page, and click on add to cart nothing happens. If you try to update shopping cart, you cant do it. It worked with sample data without a problem. Then, I have deleted some of the products from the sample data, wrote over some of them with my own products. At the end, I have less products. I am speculating that it is a performance issue. I have checked their performance tuning page, and it seems that they prefer you have 1 gig ram...

Is there any ideas how I can trouble shoot on 512. Has anyone used magento on 512?

I had a client demand Magento on a 512MB Slice that they had running a very light web and mail setup. Did it for them just to see what would happen, it wasn't too pretty.

That said, I doubt it would've actually been impossible as such, you probably could tweak some things to get something that ran?

It'd never run well though and you'd end up with an ugly, complex server running on a tiny box that fell over at the first sign of traffic.

You've got day to day prorating of cancellations to play with here though, right? I haven't seen it yet but I must admit I'm in love with the idea... Seems like the perfect excuse for it here, why not give it a workout?

Could probably just upgrade or clone the original node to 1.5GB, test it out and bench against the original, play for a couple of hours, then roll it back!

At $40/month for the difference 512MB->1.5GB you'd be looking at $1.5 or something for a day to test and measure to your heart's content and make sure you had a perfect answer to your dilemma... Sounds like a pretty great deal to me.