leaving core creation on. umcore and "ulimit -c unlimited" and kernel panic grup.conf edit crashkernel= and chkconfig --level 3 kdump on

In 64bit environment process size can reach pretty big numbers (many gigabytes). Dumping so much into core can make server unusable for substantial amount of time and can fill up your disk, so limiting core size could be a good precaution.

So can a core file be any larger than the amount of physical memory in the system?  Does swap usage play a role in increasing the filesize?

Also If understand correctly disk space is about the only drawback to leaving usermode and kernal panic core dump creation turned on. I guess if someone had a history of neglecting or not monitoring their servers we could create a cron job to notify a core dump file was present or even clean up all the old files and just preserve the latest.