Recently I noticed Linode are offering Double Ram and an extra 1TB of data transfer.

This is at the sacrifice of 6 vCPU - rather than having 8 vCPU it gets downgraded to 2 vCPU instead.

Is this worth the free Upgrade, the extra ram and transfer sounds nice but I do not want to lose performance with having less vCPUS.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I suggest adding a new Linode and performing your own tests to see how your workloads are affected. I would say the upgrade is worth it for the vast majority of users.

They changed the priority of CPU and instead gave you less cores on the smaller plans. It's also faster CPUs. I did some benchmarking, and according to some of my benchmarks, the new CPU with 2 cores can compete with 8 cores of the old.

However, the old system was also running other things, and it was not really something I spent a lot of time on, so results may vary.

If you don't use more than 100-200 % CPU on the old plan, you should be good to go - you'll only feel an improvement since the new cores are faster.

If you frequently use more, it may or may not have an impact on your performance depending on your usage.

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lakridserne
Serverfruit - shared and managed VPS hosting, SSL certificates and domains
Awesome servers rented from Linode!

On the same topic, is there any other hardware change?
I seem to remember my Linode when I set it up was just using RAID storage.
Now, Linode emphasise the fact they're SSDs.

Does that mean my existing Linode is on spinning disk and by going for the upgrade, I'm migrated to a these newer nodes that have faster CPUs and SSDs? If so, disk access would be a fair bit quicker too, no?

It's SSD's in RAID now. So yes, a lot quicker.

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lakridserne
Serverfruit - shared and managed VPS hosting, SSL certificates and domains
Awesome servers rented from Linode!

So are the old plans with the 8 vCPU's on older hard drives or SSD?

I have a site with heavy mysql stuff. I've heard RAM and SSD will help more than the CPU cores.

Thoughts?

You heard right, but of course the only way to be sure is to try it on a new Linode.