I installed bitcoind 0.9.3 on a debian server and tried to download the blockchain, but it seems to be leaking a lot of memory.
while running bitcoind, ps says the process is using only about 700 Mb but the memory usage display on the sever keeps going up and up over time. After I stop bitcoind most of the memory is still reported as being used even though there are no other processes using nearly that much memory.
Are you sure about this or is this an issue of your understand of "free" in regards to the understanding of linux of "free"?
see here:
http://www.linuxatemyram.com/Also the rate that it is downloading blocks has slowed to something like 1 per second.
To increase sync speed use the torrent.
Is it possible that this is caused by an error in my bitcoin.conf?
I doubt it. You can set e.g.
dbcache to 4 in order to lower the impact on memory used (actually used).