MariaDB Running Out of Memory? Here Is What You Can Do About It

On small virtual servers with insufficient memory, MariaDB can give you a lot of trouble. It will crash, refuse to restart, and populate logs with errors. If trading your virtual server for another host is temporarily not an option, you can implement a quick fix.

Open the configuration file:

/etc/my.cnf.d/server.cnf

and find a line that reads:

[mysqld]

Right after it, enter:

performance_schema = off

to make sure MariaDB goes easy on RAM-expensive caching. The result will look something like this:

# this is only for the mysqld standalone daemon
[mysqld]
performance_schema = off

Now restart MariaDB:

service mysql restart

and you are done. That shoulf fix the crashes on underspec’d virtual servers.

You can read more about this here:
https://mariadb.com/blog/starting-mysql-low-memory-virtual-machines