Enhancing Startup Speed for Obsidian Users

As an Obsidian user, I'm sure you're familiar with the frustration of waiting for your app to load. The interface may take a while to appear, and it can be particularly annoying when you need to switch between different software or come back to Obsidian after a brief absence. In this article, we'll explore ways to improve startup time on PC and make your Obsidian experience more efficient.

Firstly, let's identify the pain points. When opening Obsidian, users should not have to wait for more than 3 seconds before accessing their vault. Moreover, if you switch between apps and then return to Obsidian, it should load quickly without restarting from scratch. Unfortunately, this is not currently the case.

Currently, Obsidian's startup time can be quite lengthy, especially when using third-party plugins. For instance, with three plugins enabled, the startup time increases significantly, taking around 36 seconds to load. This delay can be attributed to the number of files in your vault and the presence of images.

To illustrate this issue, I've personally experienced a vault with approximately 2 weeks' worth of notes migrated from EverNote and Youdao, containing many images. The startup time is quite slow, taking around 22 seconds without third-party plugins and around 36 seconds when using two common plugins (obsidian-spaced-repetition and obsidian-filename-heading-sync).

It's not just me who has experienced this issue; another user reported that having a large number of diagrams in their vault affects the startup time. Unfortunately, neither of these issues has been resolved.

So what can be done to improve Obsidian's startup speed? Firstly, it would be beneficial for developers to prioritize background process management on Android devices to reduce loading times. Additionally, users could consider using Templater to delay plugin start-up, which may not have a significant impact on actual usage but might help alleviate some of the slow-down.

Ultimately, I hope that Obsidian will strive to maintain a startup time of 1-2 seconds, even with large vaults and multiple plugins enabled. This would greatly enhance the user experience and make Obsidian an even more powerful tool for note-taking and organization.

Here's to hoping that the dev team takes notice and addresses this long-standing issue!

Improve startup time pc