Linked Server and Cached Indexes

Have a DTS package that is running in Development, SIT开发者_如何学编程, and UAT. All of the SQL Servers in each of the environments has the same linked servers setup and are the tech specs similar. The DTS package takes different amounts of time to execute. The package should take about 3 hours to run. There are indexes on the tables that are accessed through the linked servers. Do the indexes get cached one one server?

No.

Each linked/target server will have it's own state of fragmentation, index state and number of rows will can affect performance.

Also, is each linked server identical (eg collation compatible?) which can affect the queries.

Finally (until I edit with more stuff), you have network traffic, server load, local indexs/stats etc.

Simply, you'll almost never get consistent results... if I ever did, I'd start to wonder what I'd done wrong for a 3 hour package...