Solr Cloud Query Scaling

Question: Does adding replicas help with query load? Scenario: 3 Physical Machines. 3 Shards Query any machine, get results. Standard Solr Cloud stuff. Update Scenario: 6 Physical Machines. 3 Shards. M = Machine, S = Shard, -L = Leader M1S1-L M2S2 M3S3 M4S1 M5S2-L M6S3-L Incoming Query to M2S2.

Setting max number of connections

I am trying to increase the max number of connections allowed for query with Solr Cloud. I have searched around and found mention that: max number of connections is 128 max number of connections per host is 32 I start solr in the example directory with some options, but basically it is just:

Does Solr fork child processes and result in zombies?

I have three CentOS machines running Solr 4.6.0 cloud without any replication. That is, numshards is 3 and there is only one Solr instance running on each of the boxes. Also, on the boxes I arm running ZooKeeper. This is a test environment and I would not normally run ZooKeeper on the same box