memory&swap are full, can't ssh; any option other than physical restart?

No, your system is... pretty much done. Your only hopes are waiting for one to end, or having one get so large that the OOM killer sweeps in and does something about it.

It sounds like you system is doing what is called thrashing. What that means is your system is swapping pages in and out of memory for in use systems. That includes SSH.

You actually have a couple of options. The first option is of course to reboot the server, but it sounds like that is not much of an option for you because it's not local to you. If it's at a datacenter then you may be able to get them to walk up to it and reboot it. You have to check with your DataCenter.

Second option is also pretty simple. Your SSH session just hangs waiting for some stuff to be swapped out so it can allocate a tty for you. I have had this happen to me before, and you just have to wait for it to respond, it can take quite a while. Once you have a cli then you can kill or reboot the server.

The reason you can PING the server is actually pretty simple, the kernel's IP stack (IIRC) does not get swapped out that is why ICMP is able to respond.

A third option would require some setup before hand so I dont think it's a real option for you right now. You can setup a modem to allow you to dial in to a number and get a serial console. On the same note you can use IPMI Serial over LAN (SOL) to get a serial console. Also IPMI can allow you to reboot the server. Once again it sounds like those are not setup for you.