I have reworked some of the underlying logic of how Joomfish 2.0 retrieves translations in such a way as to achieve a major performance boost.  This short article explains how to get the most out of Joomfish 2.0.

Performance Gains Explained

Joomfish 2.0 features:

• A translation cache - unless the translations have been changed Joomfish will now cache its results with a significant gain in performance.
• Taking advantage of features in the mysqli database driver where available.
• The language switching module safely caches the URLs obtained from the router.
• Where sites are unable to use the mysqli database driver we have speeded up on one of the bottlenecks in Joomfish.  This is the analysis of database queries by a function called "setRefTables". The results of this analysis is now cached by default.

Getting the best performance from Joomfish 2.0

• Make sure you use mysqli as a database adapter (this requires PHP5 and mysql 4.1.1) - Joomfish takes advantage of features of mysqli which makes it FAR faster than the old mysql version. You can set this in the global configuration - server tab.
• If you can't use mysqli then enable "query analysis caching" in the Joomfish parameters. Do NOT enable the query analysis logging.
• Make sure you enable translation caching in the Joomfish parameters - via the paramaters toolbar button in the Joomfish control panel (the default is off).
  
• The translation cache is maintained on a language by language basis and when a new translation is saved in the backend the relevant cache is cleared. Frontend translations do not currently clear the cache.

The Joomfish caching algorithms only cache the translations and so if the original changes or you modify a translation then the cache is not used and a fresh copy is retrieved.  You can therefore use the Joomfish caching even if you don't enable Joomla caching.

However, to get the most out of Joomfish you should enable caching in Joomla itself - you will see a significant improvement in your site performance!