in 1997 people talking about it on the Slackware Usenet group:

    >Question: Why do you need 500MB of swap space? You would be better of
    >spending your money on more RAM than wasting it on so much swap space,
    >considering that it would most likely never be used anyways.

    I work with systems that have between 256MB and 1GB of RAM and
    between 4GB and 16GB available for Linux. My experience with other
    operating systems is that swap should be 2X to 3X RAM

    ...

    The info that I have read about Linux is that the 2x for swap space is
    only for those running less than 16mb of ram. Your swap space could be
    equal to your ram

    ...

    I know there are broken OSes out there where it's recomended to
    have 2x RAM swapspace, but Linux is not broken in that way.
    With Linux you should have <Max needed memory> - <RAM> swapspace,
    and depending on your needs that might range from 0 to infinity
    MBs of swap.

    ...

    THIS IS CRAZY!!!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE F--K YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

It goes downhill from there..

https://groups.google.com/g/alt.os.linux.slackware/c/hWy0h_S...