My obsidian is working way too slow

I am working a on a note, which if exported turns out to be a 100+ page pdf. I don’t know whether it is because of the sheer size or length of the note, but obsidian is working very slow. A key entry takes around 5 seconds to be reflected on the screen. My PC has no keyboard or processor issues. Every other app is working fine, it’s just obsidian that is lagging. Someone help me with this.
System: Windows 11
obsidian version 1.0.3
RAM: 16gb

What I’m trying to do

1 Like

Hi,
I have a very similar issue, but with quite small files.
The vault takes long time to open and editing files can be very frustrating due to the laggy input.
I assume it is related to one of the plugins, but I don’t know how to identify the plugin causing the issue. Or could it be because of OneDrive?

Obsidian: Version 1.1.9
System: Surface Pro 8
OS: Windows 11
RAM: 16gb
CPU: Intel i7-1185G7

I will try it with OneDrive Sync disabled and then with disabling the plugins one by one…

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To figure out which (if any) plugin causes this, you can disable all plugins and try if the slowness still occurs. If it’s now gone, then one of the plugins is causing it. Enable them one by one, and check if the slowness returns after each enabled plugin.

You’ve also got the option to use this plugin to hopefully narrow it down faster:

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After moving the vault outside of OneDrive and disabling one plugin after the other, I still had the same issues.
Then I opened Task Manager and set the priority of all Obsidian.exe processes to higher than normal - and voilà it works like a charm! Event after moving back into OneDrive an re-enabling all plugins.

3 Likes

This was a good idea.
I modified my Obsidian shortcut (prepended with %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c start /high) to permanently run the program in high priority mode. Obsidian feels much snappier now.

Cheers

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This worked for me. I have a new and very powerful HP workstation (cost $5K, ie not a PC) and do not sync and the slowness was not tolerable. After making this change Obsidian was able to keep up.

How did you do it to be exact? Thank you! (Edit: Is putting the command before what’s initially written in properties>shortcut>target, right?)

Right click the shortcut, select Properties and add the following to the beginning of the Target box:

%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c start /high

As an example, a shortcut to notepad will look like this normally:

%windir%\system32\notepad.exe

Adding the above will make it:

%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /c start /high %windir%\system32\notepad.exe

This should work for most programs. Mind you, Obsidian has multiple processes running, so in Task manager you can go into processes and manually change priority on the highest CPU process as well.
I am usually on Linux now and generally I am trying to strip down my Obsidian as much as possible.

4 Likes

Got it. Thanks!

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