Board Thread:Lua Help/@comment-8335270-20141111224058/@comment-11733175-20141112004342

Wikitext was never intended to be a programming language so all it's programming type extensions have rarely been implemented without caveats. Examples include parser functions, variables and arrays. Lua is a proper language and thus has a better performance due to the way it's been implemented as well as having much more readable syntax. Whilst Lua is a little limited, especially with the Wikia implementation, it's far superior to any wikitext template imo.

I've seen figures as high as 85% page load improvement being mentioned by staff when they were doing their initial tests. These are of course extreme examples and likely caused by a whole number of issues. The template you linked isn't going to have much of a performance improvement just by converting it to lua, but its going to be a little better. It's only really noticeable when the small changes start adding up.