If you are hitting swap often, you're doing it wrong. The second any machine I'm running is hitting swap I'm reconfiguring the machine or resizing the machine s

If you are hitting swap often, you're doing it wrong. The second any machine I'm running is hitting swap I'm reconfiguring the machine or resizing the machine so that it does not hit swap. MySQL can be tuned to work with the memory you allocate to it such that it does not hit swap. With the doubled memory it will be easier to allocate for query cache hits. There are definitely some things where disk IO is important, but swapping should not be in that equation unless you have a problem. I prefer better CPUs and Memory to disk IO on servers usually. The database server is the only server I care about having decent IO, and Linode does have decent IO for non-ssd drives (a lot better than AWS).