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Partial evaluation has recently been used for processing SPARQL queries over a large resource description framework (RDF) graph in a distributed environment. However, the previous approach is inefficient when dealing with complex queries. In this study, we further improve the "partial evaluation and assembly" framework for answering SPARQL queries over a distributed RDF graph, while providing performance guarantees. Our key idea is to explore the intrinsic structural characteristics of partial matches to filter out irrelevant partial results, while providing performance guarantees on a network trace (data shipment) or the computational cost (response time). We also propose an efficient assembly algorithm to utilize the characteristics of partial matches to merge them and form final results. To improve the efficiency of finding partial matches further, we propose an optimization that communicates variables' candidates among sites to avoid redundant computations. In addition, although our approach is partitioning-tolerant, different partitioning strategies result in different performances, and we evaluate different partitioning strategies for our approach. Experiments over both real and synthetic RDF datasets confirm the superiority of our approach.