The same relocation approach does not typically work as well for web applications, but it depends on the architecture used. The good news is that for web applications, you usually control the infrastructure. This is not normally the case for native application hardware.
If you use a three-tier architecture, then you can move the application servers closer to the DB server. Whether this is effective or not depends on how chatty the web servers are with the application servers. If they issue too many web API requests, then this won't work well.
A two-tier architecture (where the web servers talk directly to the database) is more common for typical web applications. There are solutions using clustered databases or read-only ...
