SOLR, independent on a Jetty server or as a webapp in my existing Tomcat?

Question

I have an eCommerce site and I wanted to implement search in it. After reading a lot about Lucene and SOLR, I finally choose SOLR as it adds functionality like JSON API facets, and a lot more.

SOLR comes with a builtin Jetty server, running in background, and my webapp is running on Tomcat server. I wanted to know what would be better for me in long run, performance wise and ease of customization and use, whether to leave SOLR as standalone on a different Jetty server or to integrate SOLR within Tomcat, by listing in JAVA_OPTS in catalina.bat?

I personally feel putting SOLR in Tomcat will reduce my performance as it will take more time to load, and I don't want SOLR to restart every time I redeploy my webapp, but then it being all together at one place maybe a plus point (not sure). I am looking forward for some opinion from guys who have been using SOLR, as to what would be the best for me, the data set is huge and also attract thousands of users every day.

Answer 1

Having it all on a single Tomcat instance will make administration easier. You can easily redeploy your webapp independently of Solr, Tomcat is designed to host multiple applications. If you have to put both Solr and your web app in a single box, I'd avoid having two web servers unless you have a real, measurable, compelling reason.