Crashing when there's a large markdown

Bug reports
1

Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a markdown file roughly 1.2 MB / 34,000 lines in size containing thousands of repeated heading sections (e.g. ## … per entry) with a few internal [[wikilinks]] in each. In my case the file was a dump of ~3,764 graph nodes, each with 5–10 lines of properties plus a handful of links.
  2. Place the file anywhere inside a vault.
  3. Open the vault.

The vault never finishes loading — the Obsidian Helper (Renderer) process crashes during the initial indexing pass. The window stays blank white. Reproduces on every open until the file is removed or its extension is changed.

Minimum workaround: rename *.md → *.txt, or move the file into a dot-prefixed folder (e.g. .data/) so Obsidian skips it.

Did you follow the troubleshooting guide? [Y/N]

Y — tried Restricted Mode (community plugins disabled), a full reinstall (removed /Applications/Obsidian.app, ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian, ~/Library/Preferences/md.obsidian.plist, and crash reports, then reinstalled 1.12.7), and launched with --disable-gpu. The crash persists whenever the large markdown file is in the vault; it disappears the moment the file is removed or its extension is changed.

Expected result

Vault opens and indexes the large markdown file. Even if parsing is slow, it should not crash the renderer.

Actual result

Renderer crashes on initial index with EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP) on CrRendererMain during V8 compilation / string construction. Multiple identical crash reports generated in ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Obsidian Helper (Renderer)-*.ips.

Environment

  • Platform: macOS 26.3.1 (build 25D771280a), Apple Silicon (ARM-64).
  • Obsidian 1.12.7.
  • Crash summary (latest .ips report): EXC_BREAKPOINT / SIGTRAP in Obsidian Helper (Renderer), thread CrRendererMain, frames include v8::internal::compiler::CompilationDependencies::CompilationDependencyHash and v8::String::NewFromOneByte. Reproduces on every vault open.
  • Isolation: bisected vault contents by quarantining files one-by-one. Only the single 1.2 MB / 34k-line markdown file triggers the crash. Two sibling ~1.2 MB JSON files and an 81 KB zip in the same folder do not trigger it. Renaming the .md file to .txt avoids the crash, confirming markdown parsing is the trigger.

Additional information

2

I can’t reproduce

  1. Download and reinstall Obsidian
  2. Enable restricted mode and restart Obsidian

If the bug still happens

  1. Copy paste here the output of “show debug info” command
  2. Zip the vault, upload it somewhere and DM the link to me.
3

Do you still have this problem?

Can you DM me the file that is causing the crash?