I've started at a new environment a few weeks ago. I've noticed something that I"m wrestling with and so far haven't been able to resolve. The backstory:

Single Primary, MP replicas and DPs not on the primary. Were using self-signed certs for communication. WSUS, Reporting, and App Catalog all on seperate servers. Approx. 100 DPs globally. All Push, no pulls. When I try and distribute content for a package several gigs in size there is always an issue with several DPs roughly 10 to 20. Even updating content when something small needs to change in the package replication can take a week or longer as the content needs to be manually copied e.g. prestaged after SFTP transfer. I keep an eye on the DP Job queue and some of the DPs will fail retry fail retry and eventually replicate, but it takes way to long. 

I'm wondering if moving the DPs over to Pulls would be a good idea. Our site is 2012 R2 CU3 so the pull DPs seems like it might be a good alternative. I know MS has a hard limit of 250 push DPS, but they even say thats not so much a hard number as just a tested number. Which is making me think were pushing against the ceiling with only 90 DPs but packages that are 10 to 35 gigs in size.

Can anyone point me in a good direction to look and see if were pushing the primary to far? I know it has to do all the SIS dedup and for one DP that would be alot of calculations let alone 1000's of files times a 100 almost.  If anyone can point me toward an article or series of articles that explain how to test the water so to speak I'd be very appreciative. I know that at least 7 of the DPs are showing failed already, and while they are retrying I won't be surprised if they stay in the failed state.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

-KR

I'd update to the latest CU or - even better - R2SP1 first as they contain pull DP related fixes.