Transactional Replication - SQL Server 2012

Question

Newbie to Replication.
Configured transactional replication on a database and everything run's fine, but out of all the tables one of the table with couple of columns as VARCHAR(MAX) and with about 3 million records takes 80% of replication duration.
on bit of research and recommendations, I did configured the server with following
EXEC sp_configure 'max text repl size', -1 ;
but still the table take around 80% of the replication time.
Can someone point me to other areas / best practices / articles to improve Replication performance?
Sreedhar

Answer 1

You need to determine why it is taking so long to replicate.
If it during snapshot application? If so use the initialize from backup option. Is it after the snapshot has been deployed?
Then you need to use tracer tokens to see if it is the log reader agent or the distribution agent. There is not a lot you can do with the log reader agent and it is not normally the bottleneck. It is likely with the distribution agent.
If so, I would first try to factor out the network. Replicate this table locally and see if you still have the same latency. if you don't it is the network and you need to try to minimize the network impact. Use a pull subscription and use a WAN accelerator.
These will have more impact than setting the network packet size.
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