[support] problem with instability of site

[Armin Medosch]

Hi 

sorry for previous message which went out by mistake. 

I am using drupal 5.14 on a virtual machine with 512M Ram allocated
(ubuntu server configuration). First the database and now apache toppled
over, as it looks, because the system went out of memory. 

However, I think 512 should be decent enough, I havent that awful lot of
additional modules installed and there is not such heavy traffick on the
site. When the database fell over it generated an error message about
duplicate entry in watchdog, so I repaired that. everything seemed fine
for a couple of days, then last night apache said goodbye. 

What can I do to prevent that? is there a way to clean the database in a
way that goes beyond repairing tables (I am not very advanced in command
line mysql but my host does not want phpmyadmin to be installed)
is there a way from stopping mysql growing and growing? Subsequent
mysqldumps result in ever growing files, in no proportion to the amount
of new content. 

Glad for any pointers to step by step howtos or any other advice
cheers
armin