Question to the developers (or anyone who already made some experience with this):
Could activation of too many (whatever that means…) third party plugins cause any performance issues for obsidian?
I am currently not using many plugins - but that might change as more and more cool stuff by third parties will become available (and yes - there already is a lot of cool stuff!).
I am not asking about security issues, that surely is a different topic. Just from a performance point of view.
Similar question, by the way: same thing for custom css snippets - let’s say, in an extreme case, I am not using any base theme anymore but organize each single class via a snippet - would that matter?
CSS can definitely influence global performance.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Performance/CSS
As for plugins, it will depend on what they do. Many plugins might simply add new commands that must be invoked. Those would only affect performance when they’re used. Others change how the app works in general, and those may therefore have an effect in general.
Of course, there could potentially be plugins that improve performance by doing some core things more efficiently or by removing perhaps-unneeded aspects of the app. 
Could you elaborate on this in some sentences? Or just give one example for each?
Socratic method: can you guess a couple of possibilities?
In some cases it is quite obvious, I guess - so the sliding panes plugin certainly interferes more with the basic system than, let’s say, the “Find unlinked files” plugin…
But in most cases it might be less clear - at least for someone who is not a developer…
1 Like
Yeah, you got it. I was going to say Sliding Panes for something that impacts the app more generally and Hotkeys++ for an example of one that really only adds a couple of commands.
Even with development skills it will be hard to say exactly what the difference might be between some plugins, especially since it’s not just plugin A vs. B, it’s plugin A, B, AxB, and A x B x your core setup, your device, and your vault.
Generally, though:
- I don’t think you’ll really need to worry about the performance impact of plugins; and
- In the cases where you do need to consider it, it’ll be obvious because the plugin is doing something dramatic.
2 Likes