Improve Table Performance in Live Preview

Feature requests
,
1

Use case or problem

Large tables in Live Preview have severe performance issues:

  • 5+ second loading times, especially on mobile
  • May temporarily show source view while loading
  • May randomly reload while viewing/editing
  • May spontaneously switch to source view
  • May cause app-wide lag
  • Searching in tables makes them appear as plaintext

This makes working with tables frustrating and disrupts workflow.

Proposed solution

Optimize table rendering in Live Preview:

  1. Reduce initial load time (<1s target)
  2. Prevent unexpected source view switching
  3. Eliminate random reloading
  4. Implement progressive loading for large tables
  5. Isolate table processing to prevent app-wide performance impact

Current workaround

  • Split large tables into smaller ones
  • Use source view for large tables
  • Avoid tables entirely for big datasets

Related post

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I’m surprised there isn’t more in the forums about the performance of large tables.

+1’ing this. I was struggling to figure out which combination of plugins had made Obsidian suddenly so slow, but even if all of them turned off things were sluggish. It was just by chance I closed the window with a medium-sized table and it was a night-and-day difference.

It doesn’t look like there’s a way to turn off the table rendering either.

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I’m also surprised this is not talked about more! I can’t be the only one running Obsidian on an older machine.

I have exactly the same performance issue. Using reading mode makes the performance a little bit better. Also turning on restricted mode doesn’t seem to make a difference, so it’s not plugin related.

I could find one other related post not yet mentioned here:
Large tables render slowly or misrender

Using the large table from that post to test performance has a terrible result and clogs Obsidian performance as a whole not just for the note.

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