alt Hacker NewsThe OP clearly states that he wants to know the earliest origin of the rule, and the only answers he gets are people giving their own opinions on how much swap space you should have.
Too bad because it's an interesting question that I would also like to know the answer to.
Nope. Those are not the only answers I am seeing. I’m still curious though. 2x was nice because nobody really questioned it. Now that we have there doesn’t seem to be one “answer”. This is a fun/interesting question that comes up every now and then here and elsewhere :-) I suspect someone smarter than me about system tuning will have a much smarter and nuanced answer than “just use 2x”