Performance Issues on iPhone 14 Pro with Large Vault (~40,000 notes) Using Obsidian Sync

Help
1

Hi everyone,

I’m experiencing a major issue with Obsidian on my iPhone 14 Pro. I have a large vault with over 40,000 notes, and I’m using the official paid Obsidian Sync service to keep everything in sync across devices.

On my PC (Windows) and iPad, the performance is a bit slow when launching the app, but still usable. However, on my iPhone 14 Pro, the app becomes almost completely unusable. It often hangs or freezes on launch, and even when it does open, I can’t interact with anything – not even disable plugins – because it just locks up entirely.

This makes it practically impossible to use Obsidian on my phone, which is very frustrating as mobile access is one of the key reasons I use Sync.

Here’s a quick summary:
• Vault size: ~40,000 notes
• Sync: Obsidian Sync (paid)
• Works on: PC (Windows), iPad
• Fails on: iPhone 14 Pro (latest iOS)
• Issue: Extremely slow performance, frequent freezing, app often won’t open or respond
• Cannot disable plugins due to freezing
• App becomes totally unresponsive

Any advice, workarounds, or fixes would be greatly appreciated! Is this a known issue with large vaults on iOS?

Thanks in advance!

2

I’m going to move this to Help, for now, as the bug report template wasn’t followed or included.

3

You can disable core and 3rd party plugins with Obsidian closed.
You can download the Taio app from the App Store with which you can access hidden folders (in the Files app you cannot, but I don’t have the latest version of iOS, so I don’t know about that).

The 3rd party plugins activated are in community-plugins.json, the internal plugins in core-plugins.json in .obsidian folder if that’s the only config folder that you are also using for iPad and Win. So if you rename these files with .bak extension (you can try to leave the internal plugins as they are) and manage to get in and then sync, don’t be surprised that in your other devices these changes will be reflected also.

Question: iPad is the same architecture: no issues there?

4

do you happen to use lockdown mode?

5

No. Works good.

No