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I want to buy a VPS with some sort of Linux on it in order to run apache, LaTeX. I need to choose processor and ram. How much does LaTeX use? What will be an appropriate configuration to run LaTeX smoothly? I didn't know whever to put this question in ServerFault or not, but here seems more appropriate.

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Although this does not answer your question, it may be some food for thought: Components of (La)TeX's memory usage – Werner Oct 29 '11 at 2:31
Welcome to TeX.SE. – Peter Grill Oct 29 '11 at 2:35
You may want to consider (1) the range of packages you will be hosting, in addition to the LaTeX engine, and whether you want to have hose memory-resident or called from disk as needed, (2) following from (1), if you have a full-ish TeX Live installation and intend running tlmgr update regulalry can that be done at a quiet time when its memory utilisation is not a factor? (3) the size of LaTeX source files and their complexity, (4) concurrency (number of instances running at one time) or likely demand. – mas Oct 29 '11 at 8:44
I was wondering how would it hope with web rendering and high load. – abruski Oct 29 '11 at 12:17
I do not understand what you mean by "apache, latex, web rendering, high load". Do you want to generate pdfs (or pngs) from latex sources dynamically and serve the results to your visitors? Are they willing to accept long loading times? – Christian Feuersänger Oct 29 '11 at 21:00
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From my experience, memory usage by LaTeX is the least of your worries. For instance, right now I have TeXShop and TeXWorks open and have quite a few files open, both combined are taking up about 150MB of memory, Firefox on the other hand is using 660MB. When I run LaTeX I don't even notice any difference in memory usage stats.

Now, I only have 2GB of RAM on my Mac, and feel that I need to remedy that, and if buying a new Mac, I'd probably get 8GB as I will need to run xcode.

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