You will have to try it for yourself and apply certain metrics on your application.
The problem you are facing has more than one areas that needs to be addressed.
- How fast can you get the data from the database? If you just want 4 columns, you will end up with 2000 rows with 4 columns each. This could not be that taxing on your application but it could very well be depending on how you retrieve the data, the load on your server, the caching if any etc.
- How fast can you transfer that data to the user's browser so that jQuery can display it. Is this going to be a browser cached resultset? Is this going to be an ajax request and the user will see the screen and a spinner to signify transfer of data? Will the data be sent in chunks and some of it is shown immediately while others are queued back?
- Will compression be used in sending the data?
These in my view questions and areas that need to be addressed, which will give you the answer to your query. You can also use Fiddler2 (Windows) which will give you good information regarding metrics, transfer rates etc. Similar tools exist in Linux and MacOS platforms.
Finally I would personally suggest looking into AngularJS as an alternative to jTable. I have seen the AngularJS implementation be faster in rendering data than jQuery in more than one instances but I cannot definitively say that this would be the case in your project.