how much DRAM do your artist workstations have?

Also do you guys define swap space on your linux machines? We removed the swap entirely (which once was a bad idea back in the IRIX days, not sure if it still is). The thinking was a render that should take 30 minutes to complete, if it attempted to allocate more memory than the system had would OOM and die. When we added swap, that render would go from 30 minutes to 7 hours or more. This was a way to "suggest" to the artist that job should be ran on the farm and not locally...