Slow performance with large Vaults

The notes selector (when you start typing between [[ ]]) is very slow for large vaults.

It takes 4 seconds between each letter when you type the name of a note you want to link.

For example, I start with [[]] the selector popup shows straight away. When I type the letter h ([[h]]) it takes 4 seconds to show the filtered notes. When I add another letter e ([[he]]) it takes another 4 seconds, another 4 seconds for hel, etc etc. If you type hello straight away without waiting for the first set of results it’s still 4 seconds.

Most of the time it’s ok as I know how the note is called, it’s quite frustrating to wait for the results if I don’t know the name of the note.

I currently have 40k files (1.3k markdown files, the rest is random - zip, pdf, images, videos, etc), total size is ~70GB, ~6k directories, some can be 5-7 levels deep.

Basically, I’ve put a Vault at the root of my Dropbox folder as it makes it easier to link different project assets I’m working on.

I’m on macOS, SSD, M1, Obsidian version: v0.11.13

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Did you enable unsupported files too?

Has obsdian done indexing your vault?
(Is obsidian using cpu time while apperently you are not doing anything)?

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I’m not sure where I can find this option - unsupported files, tried finding it in settings now, but can’t see it anywhere.

Yeah, it’s completed indexing a long time ago. CPU is less than 1%.

Settings>File & Links>Detect all file extentions

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It’s disabled

I have tested with 20k vault and there is a tad slowdown but defintely not 4 sec.
It takes a while to index, so not sure if you are really done.

Also I don’t know if you are using some thirdparty plugins that may cause some further slowdowns.

Is the file switcher cmd-o also slow?

IF you still can’t figure out the problem, would you please take a performance snapshot using the developer tools (performance tab) and send it to licat on discord as a zip?

Click the circle button to start recording, do something that you would expect doesn’t lag, wait until it responds again, then click the circle to stop. Then use the arrow down button to save the snapshot and zip the file to make it smaller.

I don’t have anywhere near as large a vault (about 2700 notes, maybe 3000 files total), but the suggestion popup has a nearly 2 second delay from when I stop typing to when it updates. This delay does not occur in the quick switcher, which has no perceptible delay at all.

This issue is also relatively recent, i.e. since 0.11.13 went public (I believe I was on 0.11.9 before). For me, it very much appears to be a debouncing issue rather than an actual search delay.

I’m sure it’s done indexing as I’ve enabled vault on the Dropbox root almost a month ago, didn’t post before as it’s an annoyance, but not a show stopper.

quick-switch is a bit quicker, but it actually has a UI lag too, i.e. if I type hello, first it shows h and then hangs for 2-3 seconds.

I’ll take the performance snapshot now.

Thanks for your help.

@licat will add a change to addess your problem in 0.12

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