SharePoint Tip #18. Do you know “why to use dedicated Web Server for crawling”?
By default, Office SharePoint Server 2007 uses all of the front-end Web servers in the server farm to crawl content in the same server farm. The index server sends requests to each front-end Web server in the farm. The front-end Web servers get the requested content from the SharePoint sites in the farm and forward that content to the index server for indexing.
This works well for small-to-medium-size organizations. Large organizations, however, tend to crawl more content than small organizations. This can translate into hundreds of gigabytes or even terabytes of content that is being crawled and indexed, what places a heavy load on the front-end Web servers. Such load cause negative impact on the performance (CPU usage and up to 50% of trafic) of all front-end Web servers in your server farm.
To improve the overall performance in large farm configure a dedicated Web server for crawling content, especially if you are crawling a server farm that contains more than 500 gigabytes (GB) of content or if you are crawling content over the WAN
Consider removing this dedicated server from NLB routing
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