Drupal contrib modules can cause memory and CPU usage increasing to unseen level till the White Screen of Death appears.
The most obvious solution is: on a production site, disable any module you can. Devel module and other administration tools should be disabled to lower memory usage.
Here some suggestions to solve this problem:
- Server indigestion: The Drupal contributed modules “open buffet binge” syndrome
- Measuring memory consumption by Drupal bootstrap and modules (with benchmarking patch)
- Appeal to all developers and contributors for low memory modules on drupal.org
About PHP accelerators:
You might find this useful http://wtanaka.com/drupal/system or for Drupal 6: http://wtanaka.com/drupal/system-6