Comment by kyrra

I forgot to benchmark the disk before I upgraded but here are some simple disk benchmarks on an upgraded linode (the $20 plan, now with SSD)

  $ dd bs=1M count=1024 if=/dev/zero of=test conv=fdatasync
  1024+0 records in
  1024+0 records out
  1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 1.31593 s, 816 MB/s

  $ hdparm -tT /dev/xvda
  /dev/xvda:
   Timing cached reads:   19872 MB in  1.98 seconds = 10020.63 MB/sec
   Timing buffered disk reads: 2558 MB in  3.00 seconds = 852.57 MB/sec

Upgraded cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz

Old cpuinfo model: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU L5520 @ 2.27GHz

CPUs compared: http://ark.intel.com/compare/75277,40201