When are separate front end servers required?

Question

We have an application where SolrCloud is used to create index on a huge amount of data. There are approximately 30VMs for this task.

Now a GUI has been developed (HTML5, AngularJS) to interact with this search engine. My question is how to decide whether we need separate front end servers or rather host it on the same VMs as that of the solr indexes.

As per my understanding, since it is only an HTML page, separate front end servers may not be required since the HTML with AngularJS is directly interacting with the Solr for fetching the result. Wouldn't adding another layer of Front end servers increase the response time and the overall load on the network ? Another point of view says, that it could affect the search process efficiency since the amount of data indexed is already very huge.

Also, there is no need to maintain a session.

Answer 1

It really should not matter. Cause you will be serving your application as a static document which is a one time load which will fall back on cache on subsequent requests. Your search queries will be through a XHR request to your SOLR server. Hope it helped.