I'll be showing off a 2048 analytics demo at the Datastax booth. The web service backend that writes to Cassandra is written in Go. Stop by if you're interested.
Increasing the max setting does not consume additional resources. It merely makes it possible for applications to get the resources they ask for.
For example, just this morning Chromium started failing because I hand't disabled limits on one of my machines. I pulled down my standard settings, applied them, then the problem went away. It wont' be coming back either.
My recommendation for any server with enough RAM is to disable swap. This works on just about every system whether swap is configured or not.
That said, on my Linode I have swappiness=1 and a few GB of swap on the SSD since it is memory-constrained.
In any case, I've been running vm.swappiness=0 or 1 on nearly every machine I touch for many years now and have yet to see any problems. Swap is almost always a bad idea on modern machines.