Swap configuration for 16GB of RAM, 8 cores

I am installing two servers, each with 16GB of RAM, two quad-core Xeon processors, and a SATA hard drive. The machines will be compute servers, meaning lots of concurrently logged in users, each running an assortment of jobs, and various long-running processes. The jobs will be
vastly dissimilar with regards to using the memory, disk, and CPU, and to
their run time, so the configuration should be generic, general purpose.

What are the current best practices with regards to swap partitions? Is it
better to create one big, or several smaller swap partitions? Is the rule
of thumb still RAM*2 for the total size?

We are running Debian 4.0/Etch with the stock -i686-bigmem kernel.

Any input or pointers will be highly appreciated!
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Arcady Genkin

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