We have a merge replication database that has been operating for several weeks with the merge agent (on the only subscriber) disabled. There must millions of added rows to various tables so we reinitialized the subscription and started the snapshot but we had to stop it after an hour because the publication became unusable. Invoking the snapshot from the command line with OutputVerboseLevel shows it on the step with sp_MSmakegeneration. I expected there to be almost no data for a generation after reinitializing the only subscription. And having few changes for a generation would make the effecs of changing generation_leveling_threshold almost nothing.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
BTW - The merge agent was disabled due to an problem that was taking 100% CPU and causing many query timeouts. Could this have left an artifact that will require the replication to be dropped and recreated? And - this may belong in a seperate post - can the ROWGUID columns be left in so the dropping and recreation doesn't take hours to complete while it recomputes new values for the rows and reindexes them?