Thoughts? Or will I just have to build this on another VM somewhere else and copy things over?
Our project is getting rather large (probably needs to be split into some sub packages) but even so we can't build it on a 1GB machine either. Our solution has been, as you suggested to compile on another machine and deploy the binary to the production machine.
Off topic but we have been busy setting up CoreOS for production and we now have docker images on our development Macs so that we can build test and run in the exact Ubuntu environment we are deploying to. Works like a charm if you are so inclined to try it out:
https://coreos.com
http://viget.com/extend/how-to-use-docker-on-os-x-the-missing-guide