Hi we have a server with 32 cores and 256*GB* RAM, we are using this with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise on Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise.
Currently windows has allocated automatically a swapfile of 256GB which seems excessive. Is it advisable to hard limit the swapfile to something smaller like 32GB to force it to use the physical RAM?
Is it the swap file or is it the hibernate file?
The answer depends upon the work the machine is expected to do. You might find that Windows doesn't touch the swap file much because you have adequate physical memory available. One approach would be to cut the swap file allocation in half, then use the inbuilt performance monitoring tools to make sure it is still running ok, then after a period of stable running look to half the swap allocation again.
But is it really a problem? With a machine like that you probably have a good chunk of hard drive space available, and i doubt that they would be slow old 5400rpm drives :)
An ideally setup OLTP SQL Server should never need to use the swap file. It depends what you are using this server for.
But unless you are short of disk space, I wouldn't worry too much. 32GB sounds a better size though.