> the recommendation to make swap twice the size of ram comes from around
> the linux kernel 2.4.12 days, when the kernel had a horrible bug in the
> virtual memory implementation.

I've been using this guideline since the 2.0 kernel days.  I reduce this once 
swaps hits around 1GB to just scale to RAM until I hit 2GB of RAM/2GB of Swap. 
Then I just add as needed after that (since each Swap partition/file is limited 
to 2GB).