In a VMware environment, I'm often educating my users that more vCPUs doesn't necessarily equate to higher performance, as the delays incurred in co-scheduling increase with the number of vCPUs.
For VMs that are not hypervisor-aware, the hypervisor must have all of that VM's vCPUs available at execution time since it cannot always anticipate which vCPUs the guest OS will execute against.
With fewer vCPUs, one might see what you're alluding to; better utilization and lower wait states because it's easier to schedule 2 CPUs consistantly than 8 CPUs on a host running multiple VMs.
Of course, that's in a VMware environment, so forgive me if Linode's hypervisor of choice avoids this problem I'm sure they're using KVM or Xen or something along those lines, maybe they're not as susceptible.
For VMs that are not hypervisor-aware, the hypervisor must have all of that VM's vCPUs available at execution time since it cannot always anticipate which vCPUs the guest OS will execute against.
With fewer vCPUs, one might see what you're alluding to; better utilization and lower wait states because it's easier to schedule 2 CPUs consistantly than 8 CPUs on a host running multiple VMs.
Of course, that's in a VMware environment, so forgive me if Linode's hypervisor of choice avoids this problem I'm sure they're using KVM or Xen or something along those lines, maybe they're not as susceptible.