Good article ...

I use linked servers alot and have had performance issues as well, however my queries did not return a whole lot of data (they just took long to run). Even though my queries were optimized (i.e. they used index seeks when run directly on the remote server), they would produce table scans when I ran them as linked server queries. My solution was to write stored procedures on the remote servers and then call the stored procedures.

So, instead of doing this:

Select * from linkedserver.database.owner.table

I do this:

Exec linkedserver.database.owner.storedprocedure