Obsidian indexing stalls when a sub folder is another vault

Steps to reproduce

  1. Use Obsidian to create 2 vaults in 2 folders. Generate some files in both vaults.
  2. From the system explorer, move one folder into the other folder, thus it becomes a “sub vault”.
  3. Use Obsidian to open the parent vault. The obsidian displays something like “Obsidian is indexing your vault, this should only happen once. 0/36…” However it stalls here, the indexing never ends, and the progress is always 0.
  4. Remove the sub folder, then use Obsidian to reopen the parent folder, everything is back to normal.

Expected result

I’m not expecting Obsidian to support “sub vault” in the main vault, but I believe it should be able to treat a sub vault as a normal sub folder.
For my own user workflow, there are times that I only want to display the content in a sub folder (like during screen sharing), that’s why Obsidian makes it a sub vault, and this error occurs.
The stall during indexing definitely needs some fixes. I guess it is due to the config files in the sub vault that messed up the Obsidian. I hope it is fixable.

Actual result

Indexing stalls.

Environment

  • Operating system: Win10
  • Obsidian version: v0.12.10

Since we don’t support nested vaults, I am gonna take this as a bug and move this to help.

It’s possible that there is one file that blocks/takes long time to index. If you find it, let us know.

Thank you for looking into it.
Regarding "It’s possible that there is one file that blocks/takes long time to index. " I don’t think that’s the case here, because I’m able to properly index both folders as long as they are not nested.

well, what if you remove the nested .obsidian?

Oh, I was wrong, it’s not the .obsidian that caused the stall. I do find a large file (>10 MB) in my vault that caused the stall, and everything is back to normal after I remove the file.
However what I don’t understand is, it didn’t have any issue when I created the file using the Obsidian editor. But it stalls after the large file is copied to the 2nd vault using the system explorer, or when I initialize the 2nd vault by clicking “Open Folder as Vault”.

So not a problem with nested vaults or .obsidian, but a question of why Obsidian stalled when a large file, acceptable in the originating vault, caused a stall when copied to another folder in the vault.

I’m not sure whether you have tested whether the behaviour is different when that folder is not itself a vault. Or whether it would be different if you copied it to a folder/vault that was not nested in the original vault.

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