No

At first glance you cannot have too much swap because you can see swap
as a way to increase RAM. Actually it doesn't increase RAM, it just
pretends to: If you have 8 GB of real RAM and a swap space of, say, 24
GB configured, then your programs can allocate and use up to 8+24=32 GB
of memory which sounds good at first.

But

If you run applications that either have memory leaks or aren't really
made for running with 8 GB of memory (think of video editing, for
example), then these applications will start to use that swap space,
and swap is slow. The more swap space is actively in use by these
applications, the more the system is busy with just moving memory around
to and from the disk. This will drastically slow down the overall system's
responsiveness and lead to a bad user experience.

Eventually -- when swap space is exhausted -- some applications
will face an out-of-memory situation and be killed by the kernel's
OOM_Killer.

From wiki:

The typical OOM case in modern computers happens when the operating
system is unable to create any more virtual memory, because all of
its potential backing devices have been filled.

Conclusion

Hence, one drawback of having too much swap space is: the more you
have, the later this OOM situation occurs and the longer you will have
to suffer from a lagging and unresponsive system.

Another apparent downside of course is wasting disk space but that might
not be so important nowadays.

You won't feel any other downsides other than less space on your disk, I think that nowadays the conception of 2x the amount of ram is outdated in the majority of systems. I usually recommend to use the same size of your ram for swap memory in laptops though in order to give you the opportunity to hibernate your pc without losing any data due to the volatile nature of RAM.

The only cases where I would consider using more than 1x the size of RAM for the swap partition is when you think you are going to upgrade your RAM size in a short time. Or if you plan to use a system where you will store in a sort of cache the amount of memory used by programs not used at the very same moment.

Hope my point was clear enough, and I repeat I don't think you will experience any problem for having too much swap memory.

Have a nice day!

There’s no direct drawback to large swap space. With the way it is managed by the kernel an increase of the amount of swap space above what is sufficient has no or a negligible impact on performance.

The only downside of “too much” swap space is that you can’t use that space for storage.

What is SWAP:

Swap space in Linux is used when the amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more memory resources and the RAM is full, inactive pages in memory are moved to the swap space. While swap space can help machines with a small amount of RAM, it should not be considered a replacement for more RAM. Swap space is located on hard drives, which have a slower access time than physical memory.

Swap space can be a dedicated swap partition (recommended), a swap file, or a combination of swap partitions and swap files.

Swap should equal 2x physical RAM.

Advantages:

Provides overflow space when your memory fills up completely
Can move rarely-needed items away from your high-speed memory
Allows you to hibernate

Disadvantages:

Takes up space on your hard drive as SWAP partitions do not resize dynamically
Can increase wear and tear to your hard drive
Does not necessarily improve performance (see below)

When SWAP Partitions "Don’t Help" as in "not worthy comparing to extra storage" :

If your Harddrive has only 5400 RPM and you have little RAM lets say > 2GB.
Why ? Because the system constantly wanted to access the SWAP partition, it will eventually become very slow. Even though you now have space in the memory, everything in the SWAP partition need to be moved back over. Because the system will go slow, allot stays in the SWAP partition. This can only be fixed with a reboot. Which will take a while anyway because the system need to remove everything from the SWAP partition before shutting down.

**Conclussion: **

If you would like to be able to hibernate your computer, then you should have a SWAP partition. The size of this partition should be the size of your installed memory, plus an additional 10-25% to leave room for any items that were already moved over into the SWAP partition.

If you just want a small performance boost (and you have at least a 7200rpm hard drive), then you can add a SWAP partition if you want, but it’s not needed unless you have less than 4GB of installed memory. The size of this can be whatever you’d like. However I recommend 2x the RAM as a pinpoint. IF you have enoug storage space.

If you have a 5400rpm hard drive, then you shouldn’t create a SWAP partition simply because the bottleneck will make your computer worse off. However, if you absolutely want to have SWAP, then you can still create a partition using the same sizing guidelines outlined above – but change the swappiness value to something much lower.

My OPINION:

However in any case if you use Ubuntu as your Main OS for daily use I recommend 2x the size of the RAM. Because you don't install Ubuntu just because you have a old computer. But because you want to use the system as your Main OS.

Rather buy some extra hardware if needed instead of adjusting the system partitions to keep it running.
If you buy a game you also make sure your system is "up to date" instead of adjusting the settings to make it "Playable".

You can better have some extra space, SWAP, speed, power instead of having too short or need to resize everything later on. Because you need SWAP or space, bought RAM? Or need to buy ram fast because one memory slot or stick broke.

How much SWAP does hibernation really need?

It's a misconception that you need RAM x 2 for SWAP size when you use hibernation. The swap size needs to be the size of used RAM not Installed RAM. Generally swap size needs to be 2/5th of installed RAM. To find out the bare-minimum amount of RAM needed for use:

$ cat /sys/power/image_size
3153907712

On this 8 GB RAM machine 3 GB minimum is needed to hibernate.

You can tweak the values in image_size for a smaller swap size with risk of failure. You can tweak it for a larger swap size and possibly speeding up the hibernation speed.

Reference: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management/Suspend_and_hibernate

16 MB RAM in 1995, different rules for 16 GB RAM in 2018

In the days when you had 16 MB Ram, x 2 for 32 MB swap on your 720 MB hard drive made sense. A little RAM and HDD history in this 1995 Washington Post article.

23 years later some technical articles from that 1995 (although I didn't find any) might be found to mislead new users. I did however find a 2007 article recommending SWAP = RAM x 2.

Back in 1995 32 MB Swap out of 760 MB HDD was 4% of HDD. Indeed the swap partition may have been used a lot in 1995. Today in 2018, 16 GB RAM x 2 for 32 GB SWAP on your 256 GB SSD doesn't make the same sense as it is taking 13% of SSD. Today my 8 GB SWAP partition isn't being used at all unless I force it to fill it up when testing OOM-Killer: Google Chrome will take up my memory to the point where it causes my computer to freeze to a near halt. What can I do to prevent this?.

There is an overhead, indeed, but is very small; for every on-disk "page" there's a reference counter, and there's a couple of structs associated with every swap area; this is in kernel memory, so can't be paged. It's between 2 and 16 MB every 4 GB, depending on the architecture. The rest is fairly dynamic, thus dependant on usage.

So you can have plenty, but keep in mind the paged address space itself imposes some overhead on the RAM, and on top of that there's some tracking going on for swapped pages, so it doesn't scale very far, filesystems are far more efficient than large swap areas when it comes to handling larger areas as the vfs can offload structural information to disk (normally page tables can't be swapped, because of hardware limitations).

I can't think of any other downside, OTOH having too little swap can cause fragmentation which means more seeking. When having a lot, after certain point there will be no improvements either.

Swapping is generally a last resource (hibernation aside), so you'll probably not benefit from having more than RAM if you have over 4GB, and sometimes even as big as RAM is too much (think 64 GB).