It’s not about whether I should have a bigger gun. It’s about how to get better at clearing the target.
Especially because the issue is not about RAM (of an old device). For the past two days, I have been using my full/master vault on Obsidian on iPad with 19k files successfully (enough) – meaning I can put the device to sleep and continue using Obsidian straight away without it having quit on me and can multitask (use GoodReader or Safari and come back to the full vault to continue work).
I don’t know exactly what has changed since a few months ago (other than having to upgrade to iOS 15.7.6 and do a fresh restore/reinstall of everything after botching things up in the jailbroken state), but what I do know is enough not to let certain community plugins take part in my daily routine. (Some of those plugins even made my PC Obsidian freeze lately, actually: File Tree Alternative and TagFolder, for instance.)
The experience is still fragile. I cannot depend on its working reliably but it’s been better than ever before.
And again, I have to repeat myself: it is not about RAM per se. It’s about the app bloating up and breaking, possibly due to some internal processes being used by plugins. When you feel the device getting heated up, you know it’s struggling.
Anyone who says, it’s an old device and we cannot do anything about it is talking beside the point. It’s not about old devices (you can even install Obsidian on an Android tablet running 5.1) or RAM, it’s about the framework breaking easily.
Apart from stress-testing the app with nearly 20k files, I did not test the app with no plugins or snippets/themes installed, because I am too used to my setup.