I have a small home server with 256MB of memory. One of my sites just got linked up on Reddit, and since I've had two occurrences of the system using too much memory and crashing to the point where I have to manually reboot. There are times when my physical memory usage rises dangerously high to 90%, and my mysql and apache services each consume about 100MB. I suspect what is happening is that a rush of visitors comes, and the system uses too much memory before it can move some to swap space (which I have around 750MB of). Should this problem even be happening? Is the only solution to get more memory? I've heard about a swappability setting in Linux that could be messed with, maybe that could help.
Any suggestions? This problem is annoying.