> its not like we don't have the disk;
> these systems have 11TB of SAN/NAS and 600GB of in-the-box RAID
> serving / and /tmp.

This makes a big difference, a lot of my machines have only 1 TB to 4 TB of 
local disk, and I do want a lot of space for /tmp and /var.


> williams note of 75% of main memory sounds reasonable.

I disagree, nothing is reasonable. It completely depends on your workload.
If you have a server which runs a whole bunch of services that are very rarely 
used, and for which you don't care about performance, then swap should be as 
large as the total amount of memory used by all processes together, whatever 
value that is.

If performance is important, then, in most cases, swapping means bad news. You 
should monitor how much swap space is used, and start analysing what's going 
on when it's used.

The only times I use a large swap value are:

-laptops, you need the swap >= memory if you want to be able suspend.

-if your OSes crashes a lot and you want to capture a dump.

-debugging an apps that end up using amount of memory larger than it should.

-- 
Yves.                                                  http://www.SollerS.ca/
                                                        http://blog.zioup.org/
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