MariaDB/MySQL uses too much RAM

Hello,

I have migrated my debian server from squeeze to wheezy and mysql to mariadb. The problem is that mysql starts eating up all my RAM and I am not able to run other programs (another app in NodeJS is killed for instance).
I have several services using mysql on it but I am not sure it's even this.

I have tried stopping all other services on the server (apache, varnish, node, prosody, etc.) to be sure it's not used by something else and relaunching mysql

# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1981        298       1682          0          0        296
-/+ buffers/cache:          2       1979
Swap:            0          0          0
# service mysql start
Starting MariaDB database server: mysqld . ..
Checking for corrupt, not cleanly closed and upgrade needing tables..
# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1981       1093        888          0          0        296
-/+ buffers/cache:        796       1184
Swap:            0          0          0

Here there is 888MB free but nothing is left after if other services are running.

Looks like everything goes in the buffers/cache. How can I stop or at least reduce this problematic behaviour ?

/etc/mysql/my.cnf

Thanks

What happens when you enable swap? If you do not have a swap partition then create a swap file.

Actually it's an OpenVZ virtual machine running in a Proxmox environment (I should probably have mentioned that). I have 1GB of RAM and 1GB of SWAP configured. If I increase the swap size, the memory line will directly increase, not the swap.

I can increase the swap but I am not sure it is the solution. I used to be able to run all my services and now that I have made the switch to MariaDB it seems to have increase the memory usage. I don't have other choices to shut down mysql service to be able to run mongodb (I used to have both running at the same time).

I a minor detail... No actual experience with running OpenVZ but there there are some suggestions on how to tweak MariaDB/MySQL memory usage like the following. Might help you some. Another suggest is to use MyISAM instead of InnoDD.

http://opensourcehacker.com/2011/03/...-debian-linux/