From 4GB Standard to 4GB Dedicated plan - is it worth it?

That's an excellent question! The short answer is, sometimes, but the long answer is worth getting into.

First off, to get just a little bit under the hood, whenever a Linode plan is changed or upgraded the Linode has to move to a new host. This is handled by our backend, and so the CPU of the new host will depend on current availability in the data center. So it's by no means assured that your Linode will end up with a AMD EPYC 7501. For that matter, you can request a specific CPU. There's more details in the link, but in broad strokes we are happy to help you move your Linode to a particular chip, but we cannot promise that there will be availability for it, or that in the event of an upgrade the Linode would land back on the same chipset.

The other thing worth mentioning is that the primary advantage of a Dedicated CPU plan is that the Linode will have its own CPU threads. This means a few things. First, the Linode should not be effected by CPU steal, which may help maintain predictability and consistency with your services. You can read more about CPU steal and how to diagnose it here.

Secondly, since Dedicated CPU Linodes have their own CPU threads they are excepted from our Terms of Service agreement regarding Excessive Use of System Resources. In other words, a Dedicated CPU Linode can use as much CPU as it wants, all the time.

That being said, depending on your use-case a Dedicated CPU doesn't necessarily mean a faster CPU or improved performance. It simply means that your CPU allocation is not shared with other guests.

So if you've found that your use-case is especially CPU intensive, or if you've ran into issues with CPU steal in the past I would recommend giving a Dedicated CPU plan a shot. If the CPU itself isn't up to par just open a Support Ticket and we'll be happy to see about moving it onto the chip you're looking for.