Every problem is different, so I hate to judge, but what you're saying doesn't add up to any experience I've had.
It sounds like your company seriously screwed up the design if you can't scale your web tier code horizontally. I've also never had a view technology take up a significant chunk of cpu resources - it's always the Java code carrying out the functionality. E.g. I would expect the largest factor in CPU usage in the list of search results to be... generating the data for the search result. If the largest factor was rendering the result, then something was probably seriously wrong.