I have plenty of ram on this system, before I try a new fork would this be a bitcoind ram issue or p2pool ram issue and what setting would I set to give the program a little more breathing room.
There isn't much you can do about P2Pool's RAM usage, as there is no user-accessible way to manage it.
You may refer to
this guide if you're interested in tuning bitcoind's memory usage. Note that in Bitcoin Core 0.14.1 and later, the
default dbcache value is 450, and not
300 as stated in the guide.