Obsidian UI freezes on rename (or move) in large vaults

Steps to reproduce

  1. Have vault with 10k+ markdown files on SSD
  2. Open one of the notes, rename it, or move it to another folder through the Obsidian app

Expected result

No delays

Actual result

UI freezes for ~14 seconds

Environment

  • Operating system: Windows 11
  • Obsidian version: 0.12.19

Additional information

I am a programmer so if I am guided how to troubleshoot the issue, I might provide more technical details

1 Like

I can’t reproduce this. Where is the vault stored? Is monitored by some third party backup sync solution?

The vault folder is stored on my laptop’s SSD. It’s being synced by Syncthing but if rename markdown file from explorer, it happens instantly, without this horrible delay as from Obsidian UI

Ok. If you have the same vault out of sync thing, is it slow?

Yes, no difference

can you record and share a performance profile?

Ctrl-shift-i->performance->record-> do the rename → wait → stop recording → export to file → zip it and upload it somewhere and send us a link.

What are your computer spec?

Here is my performance profile
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1HjKmunxj0Y_-KvaMhVwZv1R8dkRunXTh&authuser=mnaoumov%40gmail.com&usp=drive_fs

Computer spec

Processor Intel(R) Core™ i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz 3.19 GHz
Installed RAM 32,0 GB (31,9 GB usable)
System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Are you using plugins? Are there many links in your vault? (is it highly interconnected?)

I use a few plugins but even if I disable all of them, the performance is still the same.

I don’t have many links between markdown notes themselves, but I have thousands of notes with attachments, mostly images and pdfs

That’s very good hardware and a very low note count to be experiencing performance problems.

I hope you get it sorted out, as we would all benefit from drawing more attention to improvements related to scaling, and high-note-count performance.

1 Like

Right now it’s so unusable from Obsidian UI so I have to rename and move notes using Windows Explorer

Has it always done this or has it just recently started lagging?

How long have you had this issue for?

For me it’s always but I started using Obsidian just a few weeks ago. I had the same issue on Windows 10 and now on Windows 11

Ahh okay, fast reply! :wink:

What’s your folder set-up like? Are they all self-contained within one folder or have you got many different sub-folders scattered around?

I’m also wondering whether you’ve tried this testing in a brand new vault with around 10 notes to see if the scale of the vault is the issue or if it’s something else.

If you’re able to simplify the problem to something that’s reproduceable it would help a lot.

My notes’ folder structure.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JkQGrWkeUGLkFIDlnINC1FZq0s6KK__d&authuser=mnaoumov%40gmail.com&usp=drive_fs

As I migrated them from Evernote, the folder structure is far from ideal but I don’t know an automated way to make it better

On a new vault, rename is instant

Judging from that link you sent, my guess it has something to do with the non-ascii filenames. You’ve got a lot of files there with (russian?) names.

I also see a few dots in those file names, which have been known to cause issues in the past.

Since you’re a programmer, you could try duplicating the vault, use a Python script or something else to rename every file (and its links) to something using ABC123 ascii characters, and then test again to see if you get the same issue.

If it’s not that, it could be having trouble with the file encoding. I imagine it has to encode the file using a different format the moment different characters are used.

If the file encoding has to account for significantly more characters, maybe that would be enough to lag the application with ~10k notes.

I just checked that the lags appear only when I put my ___Attachments folder into the vault. All other folders with thousands of Russian named notes don’t seem to have a serious impact on the performance

Nice! Now to remove things at random and see at what point the lag clears up I guess.