Performance on large vaults

Help
1

Hello everyone,
I use obsidian everyday to handle my work notes. I have a fairly large vault (or at least I think it’s failry large) with almost 1000 notes (993 to be exact). Of this, less than 200 are images.

Being a software dev that works on multiple project for different customers, i have a folder for each custer, than inside each folder a common file structure to organize daily notes, issues, technical docs, …

To help my workflow I have a couple of plugins, nothing crazy, around 10ish plugins, plus minimal theme.

Lately I started noticing huge performace issues, like

  • different seconds to launch obsidian
  • ui lags when toggling folders with many items
  • black window when maximizing the window whe obsidian is minimized

I have regular PC, nothing crazy but I can handle multiple IDEs at the same time, plus outlook, teams and 10 chrome tabs, so I don’t think it’s an hardware problem.

I’m running obsidian on windows 11, and I keep both Windows and Obsidian updated with the latests version whenever they are available.

Has anyone else noticed these issues? How obsidian behaves on larger vaults?

2

what plugins you using? until I got to grips with how to keep dataview under control it was easy to make it chew up to the memory limit and slow things down

3

Yea, most likely culprit is a plugin. You might try disabling some, work a bit and see if you notice a difference. I think there is a ‘divide and conquor’ plugin that can help with that process. I have over 23,000 journals alone, not including all the PDFs, images, and none-journal notes, and things generally work well. Dataview is defintely one to look out for, you can do some stuff with it that will bring Obsidian to it’s knees, so it’s a good place to start.

4

I would not call this a large vault.

Try with restricted mode.
For first startup on windows there is currently this issue

5

Yeah I figured 1000 files is not a large vault, but I also wonder if and when some degradation is noticable.

As for the plugins, this is startup time of today. No slowup noticed this time, as I said before, not always is this fast

Obsidian start-up time breakdown

Obsidian version: 1.12.7
Installer version: 1.12.4
Operating system: Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200

- Total startup time: 2,016ms
- Initialization: 1,260ms
- Vault (999 files): 233ms
- Workspace (14 tabs, 12 deferred): 169ms
- Core plugins: 76ms
- Community plugins (9 active): 278ms
  - Iconize (2.14.7): 81ms
  - Better Markdown Links (3.4.4): 30ms
  - Pandoc Plugin (0.4.1): 28ms
  - Custom Utilities (1.0.3): 16ms
  - Style Settings (1.0.9): 15ms
  - Minimal Theme Settings (8.2.3): 9ms
  - File Explorer Note Count (1.2.4): 5ms
  - Gist (0.10.0): 5ms
  - Linked Note Exporter (0.2.5): 5ms

The Custom Utilities (1.0.3) plugin is plugin I made myself, in which I’ve defined some custom commands a couple of editor extensions.

6

To give you an idea of the performance.
I’m using a standard Mac mini M4 (16GB)
My main Obsidian vault is 75GB and contains 7,000 files and a few thousand photos, screenshots, audio files and videos
No slowdowns. But I don’t have a theme and only have 4 plugins (Notebook Navigator, Tasks, Advanced Canva and Excalidraw)

7

Then definetly is not an Obsidian issue, but I believe it’s due to Windows

8

Startup took 10 seconds, almost 4s due to the vault. I believe this is a Windows issue then

Obsidian start-up time breakdown

Obsidian version: 1.12.7
Installer version: 1.12.4
Operating system: Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26200

- Total startup time: 10,317ms
- Initialization: 1,672ms
- Vault (1,009 files): 3,806ms
- Workspace (13 tabs, 12 deferred): 229ms
- Core plugins: 363ms
- Community plugins (8 active): 4,247ms
  - Better Markdown Links (3.4.4): 1,026ms
  - Style Settings (1.0.9): 864ms
  - Custom Utilities (1.0.3): 810ms
  - Linked Note Exporter (0.2.5): 526ms
  - Iconize (2.14.7): 397ms
  - Pandoc Plugin (0.4.1): 250ms
  - File Explorer Note Count (1.2.4): 111ms
  - Gist (0.10.0): 90ms
9

After the first startup or reload of the vault, does the second go faster?

My macs (Mx series chips) roll through whatever, but my older intel work PC (windows) is a bit sluggish to start Obsidian in the morning. A reload of the vault is fast though (around 10~15 community plugins enabled).

10

funny thing is, today the first startup took just few seconds, then i closed obsiadian and relaunched after a couple of hours. this second startup took 10 seconds

11

Oh my,
:upside_down_face:

12

i really believe it’s a Windows issue. Unfortunately is work related stuff, so I don’t feel connfident to open the vault on my personal PC (which runs on linux).

13

Is the vault located in a folder that is being sync using OneDrive or Google Drive or similar?

Those backup services slows down Obsidian operation.

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14

that is actully the case. being work related stuff the entire vault is synced with OneDrive

Edit: looking at related thread like this Windows Defender: Cold / First Start takes longer than expected, I added a rule on Windows Defender to ignore the entire vault folder.

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