Obsidian frequent crash and unstable

I’m having some troubles with my obsidian vault and I can’t understand what’s going: I’m experiencing frequent app crashes (an empty gray window is all that remains opened). I can’t see the developer console as it closes too and when I force reload the vault there’re no issues.
In the system console, on the contrary, I can see all the crashes logs but I’m unable to understand what does it mean: it seems a problem with the “Obsidian Helper (renderer)”. Here are the first lines of the log:

-------------------------------------
Translated Report (Full Report Below)
-------------------------------------

Process:               Obsidian Helper (Renderer) [2321]
Path:                  /Applications/Obsidian.app/Contents/Frameworks/Obsidian Helper (Renderer).app/Contents/MacOS/Obsidian Helper (Renderer)
Identifier:            md.obsidian.helper.Renderer
Version:               0.14.8
Code Type:             ARM-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        Obsidian [1314]
Responsible:           Obsidian [1314]
User ID:               501

Date/Time:             2025-02-03 15:35:04.5905 +0100
OS Version:            macOS 15.1 (24B83)
Report Version:        12
Anonymous UUID:        57AA00F4-FF9F-12D6-16A9-5DD6AB673E4C

Sleep/Wake UUID:       91B99BB9-12BA-4DBB-8DE3-5CBF2CDF6CFC

Time Awake Since Boot: 1500000 seconds
Time Since Wake:       23705 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        0  CrRendererMain  Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000

Termination Reason:    Namespace SIGNAL, Code 6 Abort trap: 6
Terminating Process:   Obsidian Helper (Renderer) [2321]

Application Specific Information:
abort() called

I can provide the full log if needed. I can add that it happens both from my laptop (2023 MacBook Pro) and from my Mac mini (M1, 2020). In activity monitor Obsidian Helper (Renderer) is taking 700 MB of memory and total used memory is 7 GB (total RAM is 8 GB). The point is that till some days ago I had never had this kind of problems with the same vault on both computers. I also noticed that sometimes even though obsidian doesn’t crash it becomes sluggish (i.e. if I click on some menus there’s no effect…)
Any help appreciated!

Maybe a reinstall would be a good idea:
Pick dmg from here:

If you have a lot of numbered lists in your notes, I recommend you install this instead:

And when the new 1.8.5 version comes out with the fix, you will need to install that.

Thanks @Yurcee , unfortunately no luck…I had already reinstalled with 1.8.4 and nothing changed, I tried with 1.7.7 but again no changes: after a while, mostly if I’m working with dataview or other notes that contain some code, it crashes…

Are you sure Dataview is the culprit? How did you find out?
How about themes, plugins and snippets?
Deactivate those plugin components, except dataview. See what happens.

Finally, if deactivating them didn’t help, upload your Dataview rules in this forum.

Dataview is great, but if dataview rules are poorly and /or badly written, you’ll get guaranteed slowdowns and crash. Let the Community evaluate your dataview rules: dataview isn’t a simple toy.

Thanks @Jopp , I thought it was a Dataview-related issue because when the crash happened I saw the text in the dataview tables ‘blinking’ and it made me think that could be some kind of auto-refresh setting in dataview but I think (fingers crossed) I got to the point: I used the editing toolbar plugin that apparently force a refresh every 5 seconds (blinking). I deactivated it and it seem til now that everything is fine (there’s also a quick fix for this but as I really didn’t need the plugin I just turned it off). Let’s see if it now works!

1 Like

Awesome, I’m happy that you could resolve!
May I suggest an excellent toolbar replacement ? Check out the community plugin Commander. I use it too and didn’t have issues with it, ever.

1 Like

I’ll have a look, @Jopp, thanks for the suggestion :+1: