wordpress going godzilla on vps memory

hello there,

so i’m running a small vps with 256mb of ram, which is cool, until i load up my wordpress which as the title says ‘goes godizilla on my memory’ , not so cool.

i’m testing a relatively fresh install of wordpress 3.0.4 with the studiopress ‘genesis’ framework and zero active plugins(30 inactive), and on a fresh restart of my apache2 daemon i’m getting(via free -m):

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           256         48        207          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:         48        207
Swap:            0          0          0

then i load up my wordpress blog in my browser, click through a page or two, then log in to wp-admin, and boom, i’m getting:

total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           256        225         30          0          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:        225         30
Swap:            0          0          0

i’ve set the php memory allocation to 32mb, and have optimized both apache and mysql for wordpress use on a vps thanks to some tutorials, but still this kind of memory usage can’t be right, though i could be wrong.

the reason i’ve disabled the plugins was because i was getting the whole WSoD due to php memory exhaustion. yes, i could up the cap to 64mb, but that doesn’t really help slim down this beast.

any help would be much appreciated.

TIA