[tpearl5]

Yeh, unfortunately my page load times weren't as good to begin with as they could be, but in my testing vBET didn't have a serious effect on load times. My bottleneck is apache and my webserver. I'm running vBO, memcache, nginx proxy, CDNs, etc. I've come to the conclusion that this simply won't be better until I have, at the least, a load balanced pair of powerful web servers + the database server. I wouldn't mind having a RAID 10 array either!

Where were you seeing broken links? I have several mods installed that are also translated (vbdynamics, a custom database) and haven't run across any issues.

Questions: Did you have all 52 languages enabled? From what I've experienced this is a big issue in itself. When google sees all those pages it starts crawling, which creates a serious load. The process of getting phrases and caching them for the first time is very intensive, regardless of how bug free the code is, especially if you have all 52 languages enabled. Then re-caching every 15 day cycles and serving up 52x of pages you have is just that, expensive. I only have 12 enabled and the space required to cache and serve up 150,000 threads isn't too bad, but yes, it does add to resources needed.

As far as the effects on the community go, I can see how there can be a negative effect. For my site there hasn't been simply because conversions into members was low to begin with. If it does become a problem, this is just another dimension of community management that has to be sorted. I've thought about handling different languages on many levels, including a corporate environment. The concept of translating on the fly in a community is the best way to handle this that I've seen.