A communications switch or router employs a replication server to perform batch processing of multicast connections. The replication server performs three distinct forms of processing using staging queues: packet arrival processing, packet replication processing, and per-interface transmission processing. Packet arrival processing queues arriving packets in session queues, adds new multicast sessions to a replication set, and assigns a counter equivalent to the fan-out of the multicast session. Packet replication processing assigns a descriptor to packets of each session in the replication set, and copies the descriptor to each per-interface queue. Per-interface transmission processing examines each descriptor in the per-interface queue, copies the corresponding packets for transmission by the interface, adjusts the counter as each packet is copied, and clears the packet in the switch based on the adjusted counter.