Can Obsidian handle 100's of thousands of notes?

What I’m trying to do

I am using Obsidian for documentation of everyday political news and happenings as it is quite convenient in finding an info when needed through searching and filtering. In less than a month I have created over 1000 notes. I am planning to work with a team of people to do a collaborative documentation of the news/events. I am expecting the number of notes would cross 10,000 in about 6 months and there would be several 100,000 notes in 5 years or so. Will Obsidian be able to handle this volume, or should I choose some other tool or CMS for this kind of work? Your suggestions will be quite valuable.

1 Like

You can find some discussion here: Maximum Number of Notes in Vault - #5 by Silver

And some tests here: TfT Performance: Interim Results - by Alexander Rink

Almost certainly you’ll want to disable the graph view.

A few people have reported that some operations become sluggish, but I don’t know the specifics.

1 Like

Anything involving moving or renaming folders with hundreds or thousands of notes in them will lock up Obsidian for several minutes.

Obsidian interprets moving a folder as creating that folder anew, so if you’re using Obsidian Sync it will delete that entire directory from the remote site and re-upload everything. Then each device synced to it will have to delete and re-download everything as well, requiring you to keep the client device on and open to Obsidian the entire time.

DO NOT WAIT. If you wait to sync large changes to a client device, this can cause errors in the sync, which can propagate back to the primary location of your Library. This can cause a persistent divergence between the state of the client device and the primary device. This is fiddly to fix.

When syncs are occurring, the client Obsidian becomes useless for taking notes. (This seems to only happen on devices with little onboard RAM like phones and tablets.)

Large Obsidian libraries do cause slowdown in selecting files (the contents of each note take noticeably longer to render), especially on devices with less memory, such as phones and tablets. It lags noticeably, and on devices with less RAM, has even caused the client to crash.

With large libraries on lower RAM, it will frequently trigger a sync in the middle of taking a note, and this can result in 5-10 words (30-60 characters) of work being lost. There is no way to predict or avoid this.

The same goes if you are copy-pasting from another app on the same device. I have lost substantial amounts of work switching away and switching back. (50 words or so.) I have gotten in the habit of triggering a manual save before switching apps, or just after finishing a note, so I don’t lose what I just typed. Apps which themselves take up a lot or all the memory, such as Kindle, are especially bad on this count.

I’m sure there are other difficulties, but these are the ones that come to mind right now.

In short: Large libraries and small amounts of RAM have a problem. Large libraries and sync has difficulties. Neither of these are particularly surprising.

Source: A couple of years experience of using Obsidian with a very large Library. Currently 86,313 files spread across 6,183 folders.

2 Likes

Thank you so much for the valuable inputs!!

Would you recommend some other tool/CMS that would be more efficient?