Dataview freezing my entire vault

Help
1

What I’m trying to do

I have a few tables for keeping track of my movie ratings and stuff, and I can’t look at them anymore because they freeze my entire vault and I have to close and open obsidian again.

It worked just fine until a few days ago the drive on my laptop was cleared and I had to restore from a backup, that’s when the issue started I think (or maybe it just conveniently lined up with that and something else caused it, I’m not sure) and if I look at the same tables on mobile it loads just fine it doesn’t freeze or even load for any amount of time. There’s a little over 100 entries, maybe close to 150, so I don’t really know what’s happening.

Here’s the yaml for my movie ratings table

table
    ("![](" + image + ")") as Poster,
    onlineRating as "Online Rating",
    personalRating as "Personal Rating",
    director as Director,
    actors as "Cast",
    genres as Genre
from #mediaDB/tv/movie
where watched = true
sort personalRating desc

Does anyone see anything wrong with this? Something glaringly obvious that might be causing this? I’m not super familiar with yaml or javascript and had ChatGPT help me write this (shameful, I know, but I’m very new and I think it’s a pretty great way to learn things like this honestly) so it might be some simple mistake or some way that I have it setup causing the slowdown.

Things I have tried

I’ve tried restarting Obsidian, re-installing and updating the dataview plugin, disabling all other plugins to find any incompatibilities, even restoring my vault from a backup again, nothing seems to be working. Please let me know of any other suggestions or ideas that might help.

2

I have the same problem. When I start over, the moment I add dataview to my vault everything freezes.

1 Like
3

I am also facing the same issue, my query is very simple one to list files that created within 7 days.

4

in general the more stuff you can eliminate with tags and paths in the FROM, the faster it’ll be. WHERE filtering does reduce the results, but doesn’t usually speed things up. Also if you include FLATTEN it can be very easy to give even a medium sized vault too much to handle if you aren’t careful.
to avoid dodgy half complete queries it’s sometimes worth breaking the ```dataview opener until you’re satisfied with your changes.

2 Likes
5

Same issue here - Dataview works in Preview Mode, but in Reading Mode Obsidian freezes completely (and not for some time - it’s dead). Even no time for any output on console.

6

I am also facing the same issue, No matter how simple is the query when I switch a note to reading mode and if the note has Dataview query the whole vault freezes.

I have also tried in an empty vault (created a for testing with only 5 pages and only Dataview plugin) that also behaves the same.

Dataview plugin version: 0.5.67

7

Where do you get the images from? Locally or the internet? That could have an impact if you’re downloading a few hundred images for each rim of the query.

Other than that the query looks innocent enough, and nothing should warrant a freeze.

For all non OP posts without queries, it’s very hard to answer why you’ve got issues when we don’t know any details on the query or setup. Dataview in general doesn’t freeze up a vault unless you ask it to process too much data.

2 Likes
8

It is web links, I figured that could be the issue, but I’m unsure of any way to like mass download the image links so they could be loaded locally. But, I also attempted just getting rid of the poster element in the query, and that didn’t seem to fix anything.

And an update, I recently switched from an iPhone 13 (the phone I used when I made this post, and said that everything would load quick and easy) to a samsung galaxy s23, and now everything loads very slow on my phone as well.

9

I don’t see anything wrong in your code to cause the slowdown you describe. Phone brand doesn’t matter, as long it’s a known brand.

Question: Have you tried to download the posters, to see if this solves your problem?

IMO, it’s pointless to tell a script to re-download posters all times, instead to download them once manually and load them locally.

10

Another thing you could try is removing different bits and pieces of your query, to see if it is the rendering of that particularly bit which is causing the freeze.

I’ve never needed to, but if nothing else works it could be interesting to remove the cache for your vault. Or try copying the media files to another vault and see if that’s the issue.

Can you limit the starting file set some more, like adding which folder you can find the files in?

How many files in total are there in your vault? How many files have the tag? compared to how many have been watched?

11

Update for anyone that is interested: I recently switched to Fedora linux instead of Windows 11, and now things are quick and snappy again. It still freezes on Windows and my Samsung Galaxy, and I didn’t make any changes to the query or anything, I guess Fedora is just built different.