How to Speed Up CPU-Intensive Tasks in an Obsidian Plugin? Workers Not Supported

[sunwei]

Hi everyone! I’m developing an Obsidian plugin that acts like a static site generator (similar to Hugo), converting Markdown into HTML using custom templates.

Performance Issue

I’m running into a bottleneck with template rendering, which is CPU-intensive:

• Same code:

  • ~5ms per page when run in a standalone Node.js environment
  • ~30–50ms per page when run inside Obsidian

Workers Not Supported

I tried using Worker / worker_threads to offload CPU-heavy logic, but Obsidian’s environment seems to block that:

Error: Failed to construct 'Worker': The V8 platform used by this instance of Node does not support creating Workers

Question

What are the best practices for performing CPU-intensive operations in an Obsidian plugin, especially when multithreading isn’t available?

What I’ve Tried

• Breaking work into chunks with setTimeout() to yield back to the event loop
• Reporting progress during long tasks
• Simulating async processing — but no major performance improvement

Looking for Advice

• Any recommended strategies to speed up CPU-bound code in plugins?
• Any alternatives to Workers for parallel or non-blocking execution?

[joethei]

Workers are supported, you just need to make sure that your build tool output’s the Browser compatible version and not the Node.js version.

[sunwei]

Thanks for quick response, let me have a try with Browser Worker.