PostgreSQL In Memory Database
I'm now using streaming replication which is async. This means my MASTER could be running all in memory, with the separate SLAVE instance using traditional disk.
A machine restart would involve stopping the SLAVE, copying the postgresql data back into ramdisk and then restarting the MASTER followed by the SLAVE. This would be an interesting possibility which compares well with something like REDIS, but with the advantage of redundancy / hotstandby / backup / sql / rich toolset etc.
have you seen the Server Configuration manual chapter? check it out, then google postgresql memory tuning.
I have to believe that Postgres is written in such a way as to take full advantage of available RAM in the server. As you may have guessed by now, there's no reliable way to do this outside of Postgres.
Within Postgres, transactions assure that all operations are atomic, so if the power goes down while you are writing to a Postgres database, you will only lose that particular operation, and not the entire database.