>From a performance point of view, I can't imagine it mattering. In our setup, >we have a dedicated Solr server that is not a shard that takes incoming >requests (we call it the "coordinator"). This server is very lightweight and >practically has no load at all.
My gut feeling is that having a separate dedicated server might be a slightly better approach, as it will have totally different performance characteristics than the shards, and so you can tune it for this. -Michael
