PARA + Zettelkasten Vault Template: Powerful Organization, Task Tracking, and Focus Tools All in One!

I tried your vault with 15k notes (extensive links usage) on a faster laptop (Intel i5, 16GB RAM) on Windows 11, with all the CSS I considered “heavy” enabled and most if not all of the plugins that I knew to be necessary for all the functionality users will need.

I was running multiple DVJs queries, Datacore, Omnisearch queries (users with larger vaults may want to increase the searchDelay to 1000ms or more in the data.json of the Home Tab plugin with the plugin disabled for the duration of this edit), flipped stuff around and was watching the Task Manager.
I felt a lag with page scrolling and typing when the RAM consumption went up to 4-6GB. After disabling Omnisearch (and a couple of other plugins that I found substitutions for, namely, Editing Toolbar and Style Settings), the sluggish behaviour is gone. Mind you, I have several plugins (DV, DC, Obsidian Query Language, Graph Analysis, etc.) that do indexing so other people may not need to chuck Omnisearch (which I will miss mostly for the fuzzy search capabilities, otherwise I sometimes use the ripgrep function of Another Quick Switcher with regex).

BTW, Editing Toolbar has a fix in the form of a main.js, when downloaded and installed, CPU usage will go down in the main process of Obsidian.
Style Settings substitution is just pure CSS, not another plugin, of course.

In the meantime, I have also found that extensive backlinks and the enablement of the Graph core plugin slows down Backlinks results generation. Had to disable the Graph plugin. This is a known issue. For Local Graphs, users can try the Juggl plugin as a replacement.

In the end, I again had to strip off the extra functionality (bar Datacore, which I took on earlier). And even after discarding my changes, the vault was sluggish. I have an idea that either Omnisearch or quite possibly the Tasks plugin corrupts the index* and that’s why the Backlinks are super slow and over time the general UI handling starts being off.

So if I may be inclined in the future to try testing again, I’d start with these two plugins removed.

Update 1

I have gone ahead and did some more testing.
My Backlinks results super slow issue comes from either of the following Multi Columns.css files (I tried these on alternate occasions): MCL Multi Column (from the current vault, possibly from here, but in we find a variant (I didn’t diff them) of it in another Demo Vault here).
Anyone can try it for themselves. Enable either of the snippets from either of the Demo vaults. Open a note in your own old vault with many backlinks upon startup. Backlinks come in fast. Now open a note where you have callouts. Go back to the earlier note and watch the results come in in Backlinks. Slower now with the progress bar stuttering. This on a freshly installed Windows 11, with freshly indexed Obsidian 1.7.7., with no community plugins.
We see many issues at Efemkay’s GH site. One of these from a can-do person with diagnostic skills feature performance issues:

Update 2

I have finalized my existing vault with most of the functionality of the demo vault by OP.
Unfortunately, trying an earlier version of the Multi Columns snippet didn’t solve the slow-vault problem in the long run.

  • I used the Obsidian Columns plugin, which took some fiddling around; luckily, the Meta Bind buttons were outside the scope of the columns, otherwise these plugins don’t play well together.

Instead of Omnisearch (which doesn’t work well with the Lazy Plugins loader),

  • I used Another Quick Switcher plugin’s ripgrep function (users need to install it; in the settings, it is called simply grep, for some reason, though).

Luckily, the files in the CSS folder don’t cause performance issues.
I didn’t look for replacements for other Efemkay snippets.

Update 3

About the Image Toolkit plugin: it also has some issue at my end as the CPU on the main process shows 6% when enabling it. The other plugin with the same functionality – Awesome Image – doesn’t cause this problem.

Apparently, Tasks causes no problems whatsoever on large vaults anymore.

I hope this helps users of large vaults with your building blocks.
Thank you again for your great contribution!


* Built-in Obsidian ‘Rebuild Vault Cache’ wasn’t even enough; I had to wipe the whole config folder in ‘C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\obsidian’ and re-add my vaults, and now it’s back to normal.

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