How much swap space for a 32 GB RAM system?

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2014, Arthur Chance wrote:

> I'm getting a new machine with 32 GB of memory. The old "twice physical 
> memory" sizing seems ridiculous, so how big should I make swap? Do I even 
> need swap with this much memory?

Technically, no, but the system does like to have at least a little swap 
space and can benefit from it.  (I forget where this is explained, 
tuning(7) maybe.)

How much swap to allocate depends on the use of the system.  On 
desktop-type systems where I'd normally not expect swap to be needed, I 
usually use 4G as a size large enough to be useful if it is ever needed 
but not so big as to make a noticeable dent in disk usage.