[saq]

I've done it both ways, assuming that you have an adequate amount of RAM it's not something I worry about much anymore. If you're likely to be using swap frequently there is a case for boosting your swap partition, as then the swap doesn't have to go through the main filesystem - but if you're likely to be using swap frequently there also is a case for getting more RAM or a separate swap drive.

Tweaking disk settings and partitions was much more important in the EFS days. Since 6.2 (and even in most cases 5.3) SGI had things down well enough that if you don't know why you're changing something there will probably not be much of an advantage to you.