The Publisher is located in the UK datacenter and the Subscriber is located in the Australia datacenter and the servers are connected via VPN. In the past when applying the initial snapshot we needed more than 12 hours to synchronize the databases.
Applying the snapshot via command line (aka by hand) on the local server solved my problem. Let’s look at the steps to apply a replication snapshot via the command line.
origin - http://www.pipiscrew.com/?p=5843 apply-sql-server-snapshot-locally-at-the-subscriber-via-command-line