Question : recommended swap space

There are more opinions about this kind of thing than there are intelligent responses.  

Is there any easy-to-understand 'official' word on this?  We have an Ubuntu webserver in the cloud at Rackspace and need to make sure we have set swap to maximize the potential of the lowest rate plan listed here http://www.rackspacecloud.com/cloud_hosting_products/servers/pricing .

Note that we have plenty of disk space and no GDM desktop or any remote access software running on the box.  The traffic to our web server is minimal at best.

How can one maximize the usage of swap for 256MB of RAM?  Swap is set quite high currently at 4GB and my developer says that it hardly ever uses more than 500MB.  There is alot of swapping going on though.  Perhaps having it set so high is killing the performance, or perhaps we just flat need more RAM.

More RAM comes at a monthly premium which is why we are still trying to maximize what we have.

Answer : recommended swap space

Uhmm... I didn't pay so much attention at the virtual/cloud environment. So, maybe there would be 2 things to take in mind.

1.- You need more RAM because of the "large" amount of swap used (memory paging)
2.- Depending on the infraestructure of your provider... swap paging couldn't be a mess if their storage is enough fast for this.