Why would it make such a difference to move mysqld to another machine?

[John Almberg]

>
> When I go back and look at the original top output for the single  
> machine I note that it's out of RAM. It looks to me like apache and  
> mysqld were contending over memory.
>

Can you explain this idea in more detail, Chris? I thought this TOP  
display indicated that there was still 2G free. Am I interpreting it  
wrong?  How can you tell that it's out of RAM?

Thanks: John

last pid: 43730;  load averages:  1.93,  2.64,   
2.22                                           up 92+19:45:54  09:26:27
238 processes: 3 running, 235 sleeping
CPU states:  8.1% user,  0.0% nice, 17.3% system,  0.2% interrupt,  
74.4% idle
Mem: 1384M Active, 3753M Inact, 373M Wired, 884K Cache, 214M Buf,  
2150M Free
Swap: 16G Total, 88K Used, 16G Free

   PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE  C   TIME   WCPU  
COMMAND
  1393 mysql      63  20    0   400M   221M kserel 0 191.5H 157.13%  
mysqld
43698 www         1   4    0   169M 29888K sbwait 5   0:00  2.63% httpd
43697 www         1  20    0   169M 29804K lockf  1   0:00  1.18% httpd
23376 vpopmail    1   4    0 81468K 55772K select 7   0:28  1.17%  
perl5.8.8
43729 root        1  96    0  7228K  2676K select 5   0:00  1.00%  
couriertls