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Is there a general rule of thumb for when it becomes good practice to assign distribution responsibilities to a separate server that is not also a subscriber?

e.g.

"At n publishers/publications with m subscribers/subscriptions it is recommended that distribution be handled on its own instance"

or

"At j total rows replicated it is recommended ..."

I assume that this would also be dependent on SQL Server version so I'll just say that publishers are varied (versions 2000, 2000, 2008, and 2008R2), current distributor (also a subscriber) is 2008, and subscribers are also varied (2000, 2005, and aforementioned 2008).

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  • You have to evaluate the workload of the distributor. There's no real way to have a "j" in a vacuum.
    – Eric Higgins
    Aug 9, 2012 at 19:06

1 Answer 1

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It totally depends on the workload and the hardware in question. Having the distributor on another server means that part (possibly all) of the buffer pool will be getting used by the distribution database and not the actual workload that the server should be doing. Then there's the CPU and memory needed by all the agents that you are running.

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  • That's my hope is to have a dedicated distributor so that my reporting server can shed the load of distribution and be completely dedicated to a reporting workload. I have 134 agents running on this reporting server (which is acting as a distributor as well).
    – swasheck
    Aug 10, 2012 at 15:30
  • Sounds like it is probably time to move the distributor to it's own machine.
    – mrdenny
    Aug 10, 2012 at 19:15

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