This was a basic "brute force" testing for basic timings, using the YUI Console tool -- definitely not a comprehensive study (i.e. no profiling, etc..).
The basic test consists of creating and rendering a simple DT (no parsing, formatting, sorting, scrolling, editing, etc...) using a local Javascript Array for the data with 500 records. Yes, I know 500 records is quite a lot of data without using other features (pagination, scrolling), but I wanted something to allow enough time and enough page elements to make it somewhat interesting!
CASE 1 : The YUI 2.9 DT example dt_290_array500.html and source at gist 1567371
CASE 2 : The YUI 3.4.1 DT example dt_341_array500.html and source at gist 1567375