Optimizing MySQL for small VPS
Solution 1:
(I started with a simple answer and it became a link-dump. Sorry.)
I found this script when optimizing a 256-Slice to run Wordpress (in our case, Ubuntu-Apache-PHP). It came in quite handy.
This blog entry suggests skipping loading InnoDB, because Wordpress doesn't use it. (N.B. don't do this for Rails, which does.)
This forum post is a pretty thorough (and very dense) walk-through of MySQL optimization.
This blog post goes into detail on optimizing Drupal on a VPS for a Dugg situation. Lots of the MySQL points are useful, not because he offers a specific recipe but because he shows how he figured out all the settings he used.