Don't expect good performance, it is MySQL.
Is this what you mean by poor performance?
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like mysqld is taking up 12MB ram, which is 20% of the memory... that's not good
You can always play around with the values in /etc/my.cnf and decrease buffer/logfile sizes and/or the number of spawned child processes. Note that there is no way to decrease the memory-footprint below 4MB, since the mysqld-binary is of that size.
If you feel like trying it out, I recommend
this page for further configuration of MySQL.
These options will have to be added to the /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysqld script.
If you find a configuration that both scales
and is memory conservative, I will happily include it in the package instead of the current configuration (which is simply the "tiny" configuration of the source-distribution).
(If you
really care about size and performance, use SQLite (as soon as they switch to PHP 5.0.x, this will become the default database for most hosting companies)).
