How does EOSIO ensure that block producers won't be using swap instead of RAM?
For example, what if block producers will use Docker and increase its VM memory, but in reality they'll use swap which will act as RAM (see: way to fake RAM?).
How will that kind of cheating impact the RAM Allocation Model?
A producer who does not maintain similar performance to other producers will fall behind and miss blocks. Also, under the subjective billing for resource usage this producer will cost users more from the CPU bandwidth than other producers. This will cause them to rapidly lose votes.
RAM is there for speed, if you start swapping, performances degrade instantly.. you won't be a very good producer if you're too slow.. On a saturated network, your blocks will always be smaller than the other producers.. I wouldn't want to be in that position :)
My guess would be that they will miss or produce blocks with fewer transactions than expected.
The standard process for dealing with Block Producers (BP) who aren't meeting the expectations of EOS users is to rescind votes from the producer and give them to another candidate producer. When the next producer election occurs, if enough EOS users have rescinded their votes from a BP, they will be removed as an active BP and replaced by another BP who has earned enough of the EOS users' votes.
Producers are free to use swap, there is no hard requirement that they use RAM. Market forces will demand performant producers, performant producers will demand in-RAM data with no swap usage.
