Problem : Extreme Activity - Slow Merge Replication - From A Schema Update

Hi there,



We have a big problem here with merge replication, specifically whenever a schema change occurs. We are replicating schema changes, and triggers/stored procedures. The example is that we changed about 150 stored procedures and about 30 triggers. This is then replicated to the subscriber database (which is also a merge publisher for further remote systems that were offline at the time) over a 10Mb link - hardly low bandwidth. However, the replication process takes about an hour and a half - considering the SQL on the primary server took less than a minute to run this is a big suprise.



We've run a trace to see if we can identitfy what is going on. There seems to be a great number of calls to sp_MSunmarkschemaobject - we are still waiting for a trace to complete to fully analyse this however it looks like it calls this repeatedly for every stored procedure in the database. We are currently re-testing to one of the remote servers with the merge agent set to the slow profile (not much hope that this will alter the poor performance).



This task looks to be excessive - and certainly does not seem to function in a sensible manner. Has anyone else had similar issues or have any suggestions. This is very infuriating as it means that the servers are effectively offline for a minimum of and hour and a half (in fact the remoter servers take over 4 hours !).



Thanks.