VPS With 256MB of RAM: Ubuntu or Debian

I have a VPS with 256MB of RAM that I'm setting up. I plan to eventually move the sites that I currently host on shared hosting accounts over to the VPS. The domains received an aggregate of 2,046,164 requests last month (according to traffic logs), though it can vary a bit up or down depending on the level of social media traffic that one of the sites gets.

Currently I've set things up as an Ubuntu LAMP configuration, which is using 137MB of the total RAM without any traffic coming in. I haven't really tried tweaking Apache2, as I'm unsure of what figures I should put in for maxclients and the related process settings.

I was told that Debian is a bit lighter-weight than Ubuntu, requiring significantly less RAM. Would it be a good idea to scrap my current install and go with Debian to save on RAM? How great are the savings?

If you don't run unnecessary services or GUI, they shouldn't be all that different. Ubuntu is based on Debian. It also tends to have more programs and addons available via the default repository system, but I haven't checked to see how true that is lately.

I would think that you might want Ubuntu simply because of the available help base and that Ubuntu isn't as philosophically strict. In the end either one should work fine, and whichever one you are more familiar with is the one you should probably try using.

The person that told you Debian was significantly smaller may have been comparing the desktop Ubuntu with a server installation of Debian.

You should be able to get Ubuntu Server to run in a pared down state without too much headache.

Debian/Ubuntu on a VPS should use pretty much the same amount of RAM. Ubuntu's likely to have slightly newer versions of most things which may use slightly more RAM, but not an awful lot more. Otherwise, the only difference is between the base install on ubuntu, which tends to be slightly shinier. On the server version this shouldn't be an issue though.