It depends on how you expect to use the system.  If you really need the 
2 gigs of RAM to fit all of the applications/services, then 4G is 
reasonable, if you're expecting to run below 1G allocated RAM most of 
the time, then 1-2G should do fine.
OTOH, I run 8G swap on my 1G RAM system, just because I have one app 
that occasionally needs to allocate huge blocks of memory for sparse 
arrays, and it fails if there isn't enough swap to handle it all.

BTW, if you're running a 32-bit CPU (or 32-bit kernel), don't allocate 
more than 2G, the system generally won't be able to address it.  If 
you're running a 64-bit CPU(with a 64-bit kernel), then allocate as much 
as you need, since the system'll be able to address whatever you 
allocate up to around 8 petabytes.


Don Calfa wrote:

> Usually the rule of thumb for swap is 2x physical memory (AFAIK)
> I'm remembering that there isn't a need for swap larger than 2Gig but 
> I'm not sure.
>
> If I install 2 Gig of memory in a server, do I really need 4 Gig of swap?
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