[Catalyst] Memory usage with FCGI? Server running out of RAM

[Jesse Sheidlower]

Sysadmin-fu needed: I have a personal server in the cloud that has 1 GB
of RAM. It's running Debian, and the usual server basics--MySQL, nginx,
etc. No X, of course.

There are three Catalyst apps running, all of them fairly small, using
nginx and FCGI (I run the MyApp_fastcgi.pl script to a socket, that
nginx then responds to). But they're taking up all the memory on the
system, and I can't run another Cat app (and sometimes even system
commands hang for lack of memory). I tried reducing --nproc to 1 for two
of the three apps that I'm the only one using (the other has --nproc 3).
The output of "top" with "M" (sorting by RES) looks like (I removed a
few columns for spacing):

  PID USER     VIRT  RES  SHR S  %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND 

23766 www-data 440m 230m 2584 S  23.0   0:13.40 perl-fcgi         
16958 mysql    428m 188m    0 S  18.8 118:14.98 mysqld            
25992 www-data 375m 158m 2608 S  15.9   0:06.80 perl-fcgi         
26884 www-data 238m  80m 2616 S  8.0   0:01.61  perl-fcgi         
 2513 www-data 282m  76m    0 S  7.7   0:06.01  perl-fcgi         
 2512 www-data 182m  66m    0 S  6.6   0:00.00  perl-fcgi-pm [Library]
 1825 www-data 172m  61m    0 S  6.1   0:03.44  perl              
 2487 www-data 163m  46m   60 S  4.6   0:00.18  perl-fcgi-pm [CatSF]
 1692 root     119m 5128  140 S  0.5   0:56.32  rsyslogd          
19998 www-data 79452 3296 1136 S 0.3   6:10.61  nginx             
 2265 www-data 79768 3148  504 S 0.3  15:57.81  nginx 
[...]

Is this an expected or appropriate amount of memory usage? I appreciate
that 1GB isn't all that much memory nowadays, but this is a very lightly
loaded machine, and I don't want to pay a lot more for a larger cloud
server to handle this if it's not necessary.

Thanks.