I recently wrote a small web app in PHP that needs a database. So I chose MySQL with the idea that it would be efficient and not taking up any memory. My droplet has 1GB of RAM with 30GB of storage on Ubuntu 16.04. I started noticing the memory problem after I was getting warnings from APT trying to update my packages list (FATAL -> Failed to fork).

So then I ran ps -eo pmem,pcpu,vsize,pid,cmd | sort -k 1 -nr | head -2 to check what processes were using all the memory. Here is the output:

80.0  0.0 2611632 1236 /usr/sbin/mysqld
1.6  0.0 274288  1427 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

I can tell from here that MySQL is using 80% of the RAM on my droplet. Is there any way to make is more memory efficient so I don't have to upgrade to more RAM on my droplet?

I am pretty new to being a sysadmin so I don't know much about dealing with databases and such.

Thank you.