This is, of course, a fantastic idea:
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Using_Graphics_Card_Memory_as_Swap

Anchor loves to stay abreast of the latest performance options. As such, we’re proud to announce a new range of upgrade options for our dedicated server customers that demand the absolute best in performance for their customers.

It makes sense, really. The best our current systems offer is puny DDR2 memory. Just think of what you could do with several gig of GDDR5. That’s right, FIVE! We’re now offering upgrade options with Geforce 320 and Geforce 340 cards. If you order one of our higher-specced (2RU) dedicated servers, you can have two of these puppies strapped together for insane amounts of swappiness.

Stay tuned for more news on how we’re rolling out ButterFS, phase-change cooling, overvolted Core2 Quad servers, and mass-scale SSD RAID-0 arrays for database optimisation.

One of our dedicated server customers recently had a problem with the machine keeling over and dying for a few days in a row, for no apparent reason. This necessitated a remote reboot of the server to get it running again (we cut the power to both power supplies for a few seconds). The immediate suspicion was faulty hardware, but this should rarely be the case as we put our hardware through a thorough “burn in” period before it’s ever deployed. In addition to this, it was happening pretty regularly in the middle of the day.

After spotting this pattern, a quick look at our trending graphs showed us the problem very clearly. The machine was steadily using all available physical memory. Once this ran out, the system starts pushing data off to swapspace, which is on the disks. Once this runs out the OS simply has no more memory to give. It’ll start killing off processes in a desperate attempt to reclaim some memory, but this is rarely successful.

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