If you're considering a setup like that, my suggestion would be to utilize one table while making extensive use of the thead and tbody elements to organize each distinct section.
Update: After conducting some tests, I did not observe any significant difference in performance between using a single table or multiple tables. On my device, the average page generation time was approximately 1800ms (based on 10 test runs for each scenario) for both a single table containing 10000 rows and 5 columns, as well as 10 tables with 1000 rows and 5 columns each.
Here is the code snippet used for testing:
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">
var start_time = (new Date()).getTime();
function detectTimeDiff(){
alert("Time taken: "+((new Date()).getTime() - start_time)+" milliseconds.");
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="detectTimeDiff()">
<?php
$multiple_tables = true;
$table_count = 10;
?>
<table>
<?php
$table_count--;
for($i=0;$i<10000;$i++){
if($multiple_tables){
if($i%$table_count == 0){
?>
</table>
<table>
<?php
}
}
?>
<tr>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
<td> </td>
</tr>
<?php
}
?>
</table>
</body>
</html>