My team has been troubleshooting this for months now. Sql Server 2008 r2
Our Main DB & server is on "server A" and is a physical machine with a single virtual instance on it, it does not share with anyone, it has its own physical hard drives and has 20 gb memory and hosts our 1 terabyte DB and is very fast which is perfect. It performs nightly loads of data which users access throughout the day. it is not a transactional db, more of a data warehouse db.
our second sql server, "Server B", has the exact same specs, actually we doubled the memory since it was slow to 40 gb memory and its still 4 times slower than server A!!! only difference is the hard drive is on a SAN, which I am told is state of the art, fast, etc...
we setup replication on ServerA to replicate to ServerB. The distribution DB is on ServerB as well.
We did a test where we shut down the distribution DB since it seems like that takes up about 30% of the cpu usage, and the queries we ran are still 4 times slower!
Our next step is we are going to try and put the Distribution DB which is on ServerB on its own volume.
and then next step is to try and put Server B on its own server (not sharing with any other companies) with its own physical hard drives like server A is.
Can anyone offer some insight, help, thoughts, etc. thank you.