How many notes do you have?

I’m curious – to get a feel for how the app handles volume – how many total notes do you have in your vault? I’m almost through cleaning up and partially interlinking the notes I already had (and imported), and I think I’m at around 7000 right now.

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My personal vault has 265 notes, which is not that much.

For testing one of the plugins I developed I have a vault with ~12.000 notes, graph view gets a bit laggy, but everything else works fine.

The maxiumum number of notes depends on your system and what plugins you use.
Obsidian has been stress-tested by the devs with 20k notes

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I’m assuming the size of the notes would make a difference, too. A huge proportion of my notes are my own Facebook posts I’ve saved, so they’re anywhere from a paragraph to about half a page. I would guess they’re less resource-heavy than my lengthier book notes.

So far I’m pretty impressed with Obsidian’s processing speed. I moved over from Joplin, which worked pretty well for note management (although it doesn’t have the interlinking capabilities of Obsidian, but hung up on me a lot). Apart from being a little slow loading search the first time after a vault is opened back up, Obsidian has had NO lag time.

I have about 5500 notes (225MB). Made from scratch since July 2000 (I keep my Evernote archives in Joplin and port them over when they are needed, which is sporadically) About 1250 of them are my conceptual notes, 800 clipped webstuff (including my own old blogposts) most of the rest is ongoing work related. I do find Obsidian is slow loading notes at times, but I suspect it’s mostly down to the use of the Dataview plugin.

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I have 18.413 notes in my Zettelkasten with 3.2 million words in total.

Performance is still good, although I do suffer from high first search time (2+ minutes, reported here) and layout shifts when navigating, which makes the experience less pleasant and makes me lose position in documents easily.

Startup times are still good (less than 15 seconds I guess). Creating a new note still goes quickly. Navigating is still quick for me. I don’t experience a high memory usage (463mb at the moment, which is pretty typical for Electron apps).

Obsidian rarely if ever crashes. If my memory is correct, Obsidian closed/crashed 2 times on me this year (with daily use), and in neither case I lost work.

I don’t use the graph plugin anymore; I have 57.800 internal links and it takes around 4 minutes before the entire graph is build, which is not worth it for me.

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6236 as of today. It took over a year to track down and import all my journal hoardings, highlights, drafts and published content from evernote, onenote, paper journals, scrivener, even hypercard from an ancient Mac. I don’t utilize graphs, but the overall performance is wonderful. It is a joy to ponder, search, reflect, create, and link all of this content. Daily I be thankful for this great software in my life!

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I am also cleaning up my vault and reprocessing all my notes into a more productive format. The old vault has (9,950 files) and the new vault they are going into has about 100 files. I’m curious what does cleaning up look like for you?

I have about 1,600 notes over three vaults. No performance issues at all so far.

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2809 notes, 1.047.273 words, 4016 attachments, 6.87Gb total vault size.
99 plugins (I know :man_facepalming: I like to explore).
Startup time 3 seconds.

Everything snappy incl. search (on a Macbook Pro M1Max with 32Gb RAM I must add).

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When I exported from Joplin, none of the source links or hashtags carried over, so I was mostly checking for and adding those. The way Obsidian works has also made it easier to identify some duplicates, so I got rid of those, too, but mostly it was a matter of making sure all the pieces of my notes came over.

What do you use to see the total word count of the vault?

This works for me.

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Alexander Rink has done performance testing of Obsidian and other TfT tools like Roam and Logseq. Looking at speed for opening, pasting, searching and more.
He tested these tools with 10’000 backlinked notes to get his benchmarks.

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4000 notes in my vault. 500,000 words, and 25 plugins. Works perfectly on my Linux and Macbook Pro, but it does chug a little on my (admittedly old) iPhone. I’ve been thinking about splitting my vault into multiple vaults for that reason, but a new phone might be a better solution.

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I am concerned about max files. I’m a new user and so far I love this platform. But as I start bringing over my notes I can see having tens of thousands of files, especially if I try to “atomize” them as per Zettelkasten.

I’m starting to put tags within the notes and keeping the notes as they are (not atomizing them).

Does anyone have feedback regarding lag time with 1000s of tags and hundreds of thousands of tagged items.

A like the graph view - it was a selling point of Obsidian - but searching is the key thing. Especially something like tag: appurtenance and not Donald-Norman.

I have about 8000 notes so far, and a few hundred distinct tags. I haven’t noticed any notable lag, other then when initially opening the database and letting it index again (which is still not that bad, considering).

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I have around 47k files in my vault , probably around 5k of those are notes and the rest are attachments . The desktop app can take a while to load , but once its loaded it’s pretty zippy.

I’m betting a huge chunk of the notes and attachments can be deleted. I imported notes from Evernote, and I put absolutely every document I received or note that I created in there . It’s a mess.

I’m also importing notes from Evernote. Maybe around 20,000. However, I am putting them in their own vault so I can go through and glean the ones I want. There is a bit of hesitation with Obsidian, but it might be due to links to outside pages. The Evernote import plug in is really great. Thanks! I had tried exporting to html from Evernote and trying to access, but that was messy with html code that was included.