The following were highlighted as some of the performance improvements in the 2010 release:

• Reliability – All operations now run in the timer service rather than in process
• Manageability and recoverability – ‘fix up tool’ provided to help manage the timer jobs
• Significant memory usage improvements
• Pause and resume timer job support

Some best practices were also presented in relation to planning for multi-lingual sites:

• If required, plan to implement variations right from the start – implementing later is extremely difficult and architecturally unsound
• Storage design needs to follow SQL Server best practices
• Navigation needs to be designed to that it works well on all variation sites – for instance some menu labels may be too long in some of the variation languages
• Plan what redirection logic will be used – the default behaviour is to change the language based on the locale of the user’s browser, but this can be changed to allow the user to select the language
• Plan for translation of user content – this is still a manual process and is a large overhead for an organisation
• Never use external redirection of any kind such as in IIS or with reverse proxy since this will interfere with the variation redirection functionality

One of the main developments in SharePoint 2010 is the provision of the Mulit-lingual User Interface (MUI).  This now allows a site to have alternate languages (based on the language packs installed).  The site settings give the site owner to decide which alternate languages should be available for selection on the site.  When this is enabled, a language selector becomes available in the user menu at the top of the site.  This provides multi-lingual chrome on the site as well as translating site menus and site settings pages.

This option is also available in the Central Administration site, allowing users to change the language of the site on the fly.

Multi-lingual sites are also aided in 2010 by the ability to create multi-lingual metadata terms within the term store so that metadata column names and options are provided in the appropriate language automatically.

The new enhancements definitely make the provision of multi-lingual sites more mangeable and a lot more performant, but the implementation of variation sites needs to be well planned to function correctly.