[pre]
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 883 820 63 0 0 428
-/+ buffers/cache: 390 493
Swap: 980 161 818
[/pre]
I'll try out APC.

(Perhaps I can convince the server owner to splash out one more gb of ram :))

Oh you don't auctually need any more ram.

You have 1GB ram total, 500MB of it is in cache and your swap is only used for non active files. Your server traffic/load will have to double before you require any more ram.

If you're finding your forum to be lagging, make sure that whoever you're hosting with has a good backbone network because you can have the best server in the world but if you're connected through a clogged line it's gonna go slow. If it's not the network that's the problem, check the CPU. If it is the CPU then APC will fix that. If it's not the CPU it could be your iowait (hard drive) at which point you can disable logging or put logging and mysql on another server or get a RAID setup (i recommend raid 10)

Hmm... apc is running - now my cpu load has gone from 25-50 to down to < 25 but the load avg peaks went from 0.5 up to 1.0+ with the highest of 5.2!

http://mrtg.3dchips.net/

So what's better... lower load avg peaks or lower continuous cpu load?