Do multiple processes(pods in this case) increase the rate of processing?
Personally, I think the performance had better to run multiple pods on the same host. I don't know what web server you use, but the requests are processed by limited cpu time, though it has multiple processes or threads for work. Additionally it's more efficient to utilize cpu time during network I/O waiting in using multiple processes. In order to improve the throughput, you should increase the processes or instances to work horizontally, because the response time is getting slower as time past.