Speed of merge replication

I am using SQLMERGXLib.SQLMerge to do a merge.Basicaly there are three steps.

           SQLMerge .Initialize()
 
           SQLMerge .Run()
 
           SQLMerge .Terminate()

I display the progress bar and status as the merge is running.But the first 20% of the progress bar takes up about 80% of the total processing time.

Is there any way of finding out exactly what is happening at this point.

Is there anything I can tailor so that the replication will speed up.On average I have 8000 datachanges a day which results in 6MB of data transfer on the network.The replication usually takes more than ten minutes.

I badly need to improve performance.....