solrcloud - choosing cores for update and search requests

Question

I have a SolrCloud with one collection configured with compositeId and numShards=3 and replicationFactor=2.
there will be about 200K inserts a day and about as many searches. from the SolrCloud documentation:

"If the machine is a replica, the document is forwarded to the leader for processing."

Does this means that it's always better (performance wise) to send insert requests only to the 3 leaders? or should I distribute my inserts to all 6 handlers (1 under each core)?

Same question for searching, queries are done across the whole index, for performance, should I distribute my searches to all 6 request handlers or just leaders? or maybe even all queries to one core only?

Answer 1

For both queries and updates, its better if you route it to all 6 servers. For updates you might think its better to route it to leaders, but SolrCloud dynamically selects the leaders for each shard. So depending on number of requests and other operations, leaders will be switched every now and then.