Memory problems (php.ini is set at 32MB max, not 8)

Hi everyone,

I recently started renting a VPS (virtual private server). On it, I have CentOS Linux, with 256MB of RAM and 20GB of disk space. I'm running Drupal 4.7 and Gallery 2 embedded on top of Apache 2, PHP 5, and MySQL 5.

Everything works fine except one important thing: it takes way too much memory.

I've changed the nameservers of one of my domains today to make it point to my new provider. The domain works fine, the Web site is alright... But, go on the site and refresh just 20 times in a row, and there, you could be immediately qualified to be an average hacker by just having done a DDoS attack on my site. Yes, after 20 reloads on average, there's no more memory available and not only the Web site goes down, I can't even log on my VPS via SSH, and I need to restart it.

That's ridiculous, in my opinion. An old 2nd-hand Linux box of mine only had 128MB of RAM and didn't even have that problem running all those services!

How can just 20 hits take my site down? This can't possibly be normal, can it? Every page load I make on my site will increase the memory usage from 1 to 4MB. This is not an exageration : four megabytes per page load that is not freed after.

My php.ini memory limit is set to 32MB. Other than that, I'm not sure what to do right now.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!