You can enhance the performance of snapshot or transactional replication in your application and on your network by:
You can reduce processing overhead on the publishing server by configuring a computer dedicated to the distribution process. This may result in performance gains for both the Publisher and the Distributor.
In addition to the benefits of maintaining a dedicated Distributor, you can realize additional performance gains by increasing the amount of memory on the Distributor. This is especially true if the Distributor is supporting replication to a large number of Subscribers. For example, if the computer is configured with 32 MB of memory, consider increasing the memory to 64 MB or more. You can use the sp_configure stored procedure to assign additional memory to Microsoft® SQL Server™. For more information, see sp_configure.
By default, a subscription includes all the articles in a publication. By not having to exclude any articles from a publication, the Distribution Agent can use an optimal query during synchronization.
Instead of replicating a very large number of individual changes, use stored procedure replication (for example, sp_delete_everything) in cases where a large number of rows are affected. For more information, see Option: Replicating the Execution of Stored Procedures.
You can reduce the amount of disk space used on the Distributor by minimizing the amount of time replicated transactions and history are stored in the distribution database after they have been delivered to Subscribers. For more information about transaction and history cleanup, see Transactional Replication.