A note with multiple large tables glitches out, corrupts content

Steps to reproduce

Create a note mostly consisting of tables with longish content (multiple sentences in a cell).

Example: pastebin

Scroll up and down, close and open the note, click into multiple tables and change the contents, paste the contents of one cell into another…interact with the note normally over a long period of time. I can’t determine the exact trigger, but I was able to corrupt two notes.

  • Copying and pasting between table cells seems to cause more problems than other operations.
  • The more content you paste into a single table cell, the more you see the effects listed below.
  • The effects appear to accumulate over time until the note is extremely corrupted.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? Yes

Expected result

The note continues to work normally; tables stay separate and their contents are not changed.

Actual result

You can observe most of the following bugs in this note, which is already showing a few signs of corruption: pastebin. The note is buggiest right after you open it.

  1. Whenever you type in one of the tables, the scroll bar jumps around and changes size unpredictably. This is just a visual glitch and not experience-breaking, but could be relevant.
  2. As you scroll up and down in the note, you can see flashes of unrendered tables in raw Markdown before they render. Sometimes the Markdown jumps back and forth quite a lot before rendering. I assume this is an optimization thing, only rendering tables that are in the viewport, but mentioning in case it’s relevant. (A couple of times I saw raw Markdown that never rendered itself as a table; I had to scroll or click around to get it to catch up.)
  3. Sometimes when you scroll, a section of the note fails to load altogether. You see an indeterminate loading bar and empty content. When you click somewhere to move your cursor, this often fixes itself.
  4. There’s a noticeable lag on each keystroke when you’re editing a table with a large amount of content in any one cell, even if you’re not editing that cell. (Try editing any cell in the second table under “Section 5” in the note above.)
  5. For one of my notes, a large portion of the note got absorbed into a single table cell, with line breaks becoming <br> and Markdown table dividers | getting escaped \|. This had to be tediously fixed by hand in a code editor, I couldn’t fix it in Obsidian.
  6. For another note, which I created specifically to reproduce this issue, several rows of a table got corrupted (see the 2nd table under “Section 1” in the note above—I pasted some content into the second column of row 2, but everything else that looks strange was caused by Obsidian). Depending on the row, content was deleted, a bunch of empty space was added, or content was moved from the second column to the first column.

Environment

I use Obsidian on an M1 Macbook Air with 16GB RAM.

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.5.10
Installer version: v1.4.13
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 23.3.0: Wed Dec 20 21:30:27 PST 2023; root:xnu-10002.81.5~7/RELEASE_ARM64_T8103 23.3.0
Login status: logged in
Catalyst license: insider
Insider build toggle: on
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: on

RECOMMENDATIONS:
none


Additional information

The dev console is full of the following messages:

Viewport failed to stabilize

Measure loop restarted more than 5 times

[Violation] 'requestIdleCallback' handler took 52ms

2 Likes

Additionally, long tables in live edit mode are super slow when there are more than 50 rows…

I literally have to wait a minute or more for the live table to be displayed, and editing a large table is super laggy AND sometimes results in text ending up in wrong cells

Even with all plugins and styles disabled, it’s still super slow on large tables and I’m still looking for an alternative :pensive:

P.S. even scrolling a page with long tables in live edit mode shows pieces of source mode code in live edit mode, it’s chaotic.

2 Likes

@woofy31 Open a separate bug report and attach a copy of a table when this happens. Make sure you follow the bug report template and troubleshooting instructions

@isaaclyman there’s too much going on in your bug report. it’s multiple bugs into one. I kindly ask you to open one bug report per issue and provide some reproducible steps or video recording of it happening in the sandbox vault. Also, Download and reinstall obsidian.

There are two paste.bin links, I can only access to the first.

  1. Ok I can repro
  2. Is not a problem specific to tables.
  3. Can’t reproduce. Open a separate bug report
  4. Can’t reproduce. Open a separate bug report
  5. Possible, Open a separate bug report.
  6. I don’t see. Open a separate bug report.

This is not multiple bugs in one. It’s essential that you understand that all these things are symptoms of the same bug and all caused by the same process: Obsidian’s on-demand rendering of tables with a large amount of content. I’m not going to open five more bugs.

There isn’t a reliable way to reproduce the issue. Any video I make would be half an hour long, which indicates it’s likely a race condition.

ETA: Pastebin keeps deleting my file as soon as I post it. I’ll upload it as an attachment instead.

Table bug repro - aftermath.md (131.7 KB)

2 Likes

To clarify: the only bug I care about here is my notes getting corrupted (5 and 6 in the list above). All the other items in the list are just things I observed while investigating that bug, but I don’t really care if they ever get fixed, though other users probably find them annoying.

woofy31’s comment is the same bug: “text ending up in the wrong cells” is another example of a corrupted note.

3 Likes

I also encountered a sudden damage when editing the form content, but I do not know what my operation caused it
The file just got messed up
Several types of damage occurred
1 The beginning text of all the contents of the same column is deleted
2 The ending text of all the contents of the same column is deleted
Part of the content disappeared, part of the content was concentrated in a grid, and some text was lost, and more blank grids were created

I have experienced massive silent data loss with large tables with obsidian versions up to 1.6.7. Hundreds of rows get automatically deleted and the corrupted table gets written!

The scenarios are not repeatable, but a way to trigger frequent data loss is:

Have some markdown document with a very large table (hundreds of lines, 8 columns, lots of text).
Then quickly change between the documents while preview is still being generated.

In many cases, this leads to massive data loss: hundreds of rows of the tables silently vanish, and the corrupted content gets saved without any notification of the user.

If I hadn’t used version control, Obsidian would have silently damaged large amounts of work.

I stopped using Obsidian because of this data-loss error.

1 Like