My vault is growing ever larger, and my Obsidian performance has decreased over time, so I’m considering buying/building a desktop dedicated to being the main ‘Host’ for Obsidian. It would have the plugins that do the heaving lifting, and would then sync with my laptop, phone, etc for consumption and light editing. So if you were building/buying a computer that would primarily run Obsidian and related apps/resources, what would you choose and why?
Hardware wise, are certain types of CPUs better for this type of service? Better to have fewer faster cores or more but slower cores? How important is Multithreading? Would a GPU help, and how? When it comes to the speed of the CPU, RAM and storage, obviously faster is better, but if money is limited, where is it best to invest and why?
Software wise, what are the Obsidian specific reasons to choose Windows vs MacOS vs Linux assuming you’re comfortable using/managing each?
If you were buying/building a computer specifically for Obsidian, what would YOU choose?
No matter how powerful your PC is, the bottleneck will be Obsidian’s Electron framework and how well this framework works on your operating system.
Since Obsidian was developed on modern hardware, you’ll benefit from modem computers, of course.
From my perspective, a modern, medium grade PC does the job, you don’t need a monster “gaming rig” to run Obsidian smoothly at max capacity.
I hope somebody involved in the development of Obsidian can give you a better answer. In my opinion, only @joethei can give you this concise, brief, clear technical feedback
I agree, you don’t need a monster computer. Electron apps probably want a large chunk of RAM, especially if you are running other RAM-heavy apps.
If your HD is near full, that might also be causing some slowdown. Buying a bit more RAM and clearing some HD space might save you cost of a new computer, depending how old your computer is.
You might also want to measure which plugins might be using the most resources, especially if it’s just Obsidian that is being slow.
Jopp, please don’t tag the devs. Remember that is against our code of conduct. And this isn’t exactly specialist information.
I agree with Jopp that Obsidian doesn’t scale very well with hardware so basically the discussion is not needed regarding different hardware.
Some other aspects:
OS:
Both Linux and Windows are free although you get unnoticeable watermark on Windows if you don’t buy it [1]. Windows can contain unnecessary features, advertising and telemetry but to my knowledge these are not forced and you can turn everything off either directly in the settings or with some more effort using 3rd party tools or registry. I think Ubuntu works similarly with trying to ship features and doing telemetry. Obviously with other Linux distros you can achieve more user based experience i.e. you need to take separate action to get new user features. With Windows this is not possible, new features are pushed to you automatically. As I said you can usually turn these features off, so in a sense Microsoft doesn’t force anything to your screen.
Monitor or monitors:
This is really important. Consider things like resolution 1440p or 4k, screen size, panel technology and refresh rate. You should get better experience with OLED and specifically QD-OLED or WOLED [2]. Refresh rate should be 120 hz or more. You can read monitor reviews on Rtings or watch related YT-channels [3]. Your monitor can cost two or three times more than your low end pc hardware.
Keyboard and mouse:
These are cheaper than monitor but obviously have very important role. Both can use high refresh rates like 4,000 hz or 8,000 hz. They come with various physical designs and using different switch types. Usually mechanical switches offer much better experience. Rtings makes also keyboard and mice reviews [4].
Headphones/headset:
These can cost alot if you want quality and features like noise cancelling. I recommend wireless.
Would you be able to share how many notes you have and if you are a heavy plugin user? I’m worried that I might hit this issue at some time and therefore avoid using plugins or adding media or PDFs to my vault.
Even then, the sync is slow and frustrating especially if I have to enter something quickly on my phone and the vault starts indexing for a minute or more..
I have ~86,000 files (26.5GB), 25,000 of them markdown, 18,000 of them PDF, and 23,000 of them images. I do use a lot of plugins, including DataView. Don’t let me scare you, the vault is not unusable, and there are plenty of things I can do to improve performance, I’d just like to know if throwing hardware at it is one of those things. Note that I don’t currently do much with it on my phone. I sync via SyncThing only some of the content, and startup time on the phone is still problematic, so if you want all your content on the phone, and you want lots of it, then worrying might not be a bad idea…
