We are having trouble with Merge Replication between an SQL instance in our datacenter (publisher) and and SQL VM in Azure Western Europe (subscriber). During initial snapshot synchronization, we're seeing numerous events recorded in the Application Event log describing fatal network errors, possibly with larger tables which are at least 7 GB in size.
Error 4014: A fatal error occurred while reading the input stream from the network. The session will be terminated.
When this error occurs, eventually the entire snapshot synch process starts over again. We've made a number of adjustments to packet size, disabling RSS, disabling chimney, disabling autotuninglevel, and increasing the number of distributor threads.