Performance: Slow Startup, Workspace Question

Help
1

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What I’m trying to do

Work in Obsidian, it’s the most important tool that I use. Its performance is severely degraded and I cannot use it, practically.

I have been dealing with severe performance issues with Obsidian. Startup time is long, it’s slow.

Things I have tried

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I did just rebuild the index but startup time is mostly related to the size of my vault and the workspace memory consumption. Before I go and buy a new MacBook Pro, which will be a challenge financially, I hope you might help:

Obsidian start-up time breakdown

Obsidian version: 1.12.4
Installer version: 1.8.4
Operating system: Darwin Kernel Version 24.6.0: Mon Jan 19 22:00:10 PST 2026; root:xnu-11417.140.69.708.3~1/RELEASE_X86_64 24.6.0

  • Total startup time: 8,647ms
  • Initialization: 745ms
  • Vault (3,266 files): 1,603ms
  • Workspace (21 tabs, 19 deferred): 3,155ms
  • Core plugins: 141ms
  • Community plugins (49 active): 3,003ms
    • Numerals (1.5.5): 433ms
    • Telegram Sync (4.0.0): 405ms
    • Note Linker (1.2.7): 302ms
    • Zotero Integration (3.2.1): 160ms
    • Tasks (7.23.1): 133ms
    • Admonition (10.3.2): 120ms
    • Omnisearch (1.28.2): 106ms
    • Proletarian Wizard Task Manager (1.9.0): 103ms
    • CardBoard (0.7.9): 100ms
    • Periodic Notes (0.0.17): 99ms
    • Importer (1.8.4): 93ms
    • Linter (1.31.0): 80ms
    • Dataview (0.5.68): 76ms
    • Metadata Menu (0.8.12): 69ms
    • Templater (2.18.1): 59ms
    • Timestamp Notes (1.0.8): 58ms
    • Advanced Tables (0.22.1): 51ms
    • Advanced Copy (0.10.0): 50ms
    • Iconic (1.1.8): 42ms
    • Pandoc Plugin (0.4.1): 26ms
    • Heading Shifter (1.10.2): 25ms
    • Update time on edit (2.4.0): 25ms
    • Floating Search (4.1.1): 21ms
    • Text Transporter (1.0.12): 21ms
    • Better Search Views (0.3.0): 20ms
    • Note Refactor (1.8.2): 20ms
    • Quick Switcher++ (6.0.0): 19ms
    • Colored Tags (6.1.1): 18ms
    • Lemons Search (0.4.3): 15ms
    • Tag Wrangler (0.6.4): 15ms
    • Pane Relief (0.5.9): 14ms
    • Dynamic Outline (1.19.0): 12ms
    • BBCode Convertor (1.2.0): 11ms
    • YTranscript (1.3.0): 9ms
    • Rich Text Editor Shortcuts (1.0.6): 9ms
    • Print (0.3.9): 8ms
    • Automatic Table Of Contents (1.8.0): 7ms
    • Post Webhook (1.2.5): 5ms
    • SupSub (1.1.0): 5ms
    • Readability Score (0.1.5): 4ms
    • Image Captions (1.1.7): 4ms
    • Footnote Shortcut (0.1.3): 4ms
    • Nested tags graph (1.0.4): 4ms
    • Frontmatter Tag Suggest (0.4.1): 4ms
    • TOC compatible with Publish (3.2.0): 4ms
    • Excel to Markdown Table (0.4.0): 4ms
    • PDF Paste (1.0.0): 3ms
    • Tidy Footnotes (0.1.2): 3ms
    • Mark and Select (1.0.2): 3ms

I don’t want to disable any more plugins, I use them all. I need my files, I search them all.

It says I have 22 tabs open but here’s what I’m looking at:

Screen capture - Obsidian workspace
Screen capture - Obsidian workspace1910×945 215 KB

I’m hoping someone sees some phantom split pane I can drag on to find these phantom tabs. Is there anything I can do?

2

If I remember correctly, the amount of tabs (in the Workspace) the “startup time” mentions also includes the sidebar tabs. :thinking:
Edit: This is what I remember seeing somewhere on Discord when the “Startup time” feature was implemented to one or another Catalyst/Insider release :blush:

So, if I’m not mistaken (again :sweat_smile:), the “21 tabs” represents the amount of open notes tabs + the tabs within both left and right sidebars.
And from all those tabs only 2 were actually loaded when you launched Obsidian/open your vault (as 19 of them were deferred (for a bit later)).

Sadly, I can’t really confirm this because the “Startup time” section in the doc: here only states:

  • Workspace: Time to restore tabs and layout.

When it comes to this:

I’m not sure :pensive_face: …

You could try to disable your potential CSS snippets and/or use the default theme to see if it helps ?
Check if your theme/plugins are up-to-date ?
You could maybe try to upgrade your installer ? (Although 1.8.4 isn’t that old but sometimes, it helps :woman_shrugging: )

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3

Actually, that does make sense. When I count up my pinned, unpinned active, two sidebars, and the notes that are listed when I ⌘+O to find or create a new note it adds up.

I’m due a new MacBook anyway, this one, as fantastic as it is having the high-end, final MBP that ran BootCamp on the Intel Core i9 so I can dual-boot and emulate Windows 11 in VMWare Fusion, I just can’t smoothly do all my content creative work.

Thanks, you helped me understand! I also decided to stop being so stubborn, close the extra tabs, and just concentrate on one or three things at a time.

Best,
Cormac

4

The key may be the last active tab. If the file is really long, it can make Obsidian start up slowly.
At a last resort, rename workspace.json in your .obsidian config folder (equivalent to a delete) and you get a fresh start, but then you need to add your sidebar tabs back again (or you can load a workspace if you saved one previously once you are in).

Processor has nothing to do with this, I think.

1 Like