User:Sbb/sandbox/Episode table

This is an experiment to determine if there is a substantial parser benefit or penalty when using different (otherwise equivalent) uses of the Episode table template.

Background
The template generates table header information for lists of episodes of TV shows. Usually, the episode tables are separated per season, and quite often, the episode tables are given their own articles, which are then usually transcluded in higher-level articles about the TV series or total episodes. For instance, the article on List of Family Guy episodes looks something like:

Season 2 (1999–2000)
...

The Family Guy (season 1) article contains the following episode list:

Simplifying the pattern, it looks like:

But, using the y parameter, it could just as well be:

...

Note that in real articles, the table closure on the last line varies between, , and even sometimes, clearly erroneously,.

Test article
I used the List of Annoying Orange episodes article because it is a huge article with over 10 template transclusions of, in an attempt to get some meaningful data about table parsing and parser function execution time. The results are shown below.

Test cases

 * User:Sbb/sandbox/Episode table/dontclose : Uses
 * User:Sbb/sandbox/Episode table/episodes : Uses (embedded s)
 * User:Sbb/sandbox/Episode table/dontclose noinvoke : Uses


 * User:Sbb/sandbox/Episode table/episodes noinvoke : Uses (embedded s)

,
Lua Profile: Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::getExpandedArgument              1760 ms       54.7% ?                                                               300 ms        9.3% recursiveClone                                   160 ms        5.0% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::match                             100 ms        3.1% Scribunto_LuaSandboxCallback::expandTemplate                     80 ms        2.5% dataWrapper                                          60 ms        1.9% type                                                             60 ms        1.9% makeCheckSelfFunction                        40 ms        1.2%                                                   40 ms        1.2% init                                           40 ms        1.2% [others]                                                        580 ms       18.0% Number of Wikibase entities loaded: 0/400 -->

<!-- Transclusion expansion time report (%,ms,calls,template) 100.00% 3587.252     1 -total 82.63% 2964.194   664 Template:Episode_list 60.91% 2185.056    13 Template:Episode_table 32.29% 1158.424   677 Template:Start_date 18.21% 653.391    690 Template:MONTHNAME 11.95% 428.820    690 Template:MONTHNUMBER 5.13% 184.053      1 Template:Series_overview 4.59% 164.592      1 Template:Cite_web 3.10% 111.160      1 Template:Aired_episodes 0.66%  23.619     12 Template:End_date