I've been running 0.11.0 without any problems since August with 2.0 GB RAM.  Last week I did my regular Ubuntu updates, including the dist-upgrade.  I'm currently on:
$ uname -a
Linux xi-btc-01 3.16.0-50-generic #67~14.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 2 22:07:51 UTC 2015 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Since then my bitcoind has crashed on a regular basis.  I upped the RAM to 3.0 GB and now it just crashes less frequently, but eventually does.  My top shows:

top - 14:18:36 up 1 day,  9:59,  1 user,  load average: 0.40, 0.28, 0.30
Tasks: 464 total,   1 running, 463 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.1 us,  0.6 sy,  1.2 ni, 97.6 id,  0.6 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   3068140 total,  2998572 used,    69568 free,    11516 buffers
KiB Swap:        0 total,        0 used,        0 free.   723892 cached Mem

   PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
  3795 XXX  20   0 3125184 1.859g   9496 S  12.9 63.5 207:57.97 bitcoind

So it using all of the 3GB RAM.
I ran bitcoind once in debug mode and the last line showed it stop during a ping.  Syslog didn't show anything.
Has anyone else seen any crashes recently?  Any idea what RAM spec I should be running with?  Thanks.