Comments are: it's to be expected
200 MB modern application built on top of Chrome can’t handle a few files.
Emacs from the 70/80s can handle a thousand files. Something is wrong with computers.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS)
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A place for people to discuss Personal Knowledge Management Systems (PKMS) such as "Building a Second Brain" (BASB), Obsidian, and more.
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Nothing is wrong with computers. Something is wrong with developers.
"You WILL accept our defined use cases for you. We aren't interested in writing robust software. We're interested in writing it badly in 2 days so we can spend the rest of the money on marketing."
I'm sure most developers would prefer spending the necessary time to write something good. The problem is perverse incentives in the corporate model.
Sure, for normal software on a real platform. But in mobile it's often small startups, which means this is explicitly what they WANT.
Again, the developers, or those in charge?
At a small enough company they're often the same thing.
Also, on mobile, developers who make good, reliable, robust software are discouraged from making such things. There's a reason there are so few pieces of "finished" software on mobile. Because you'll invest months of your life into making an incredibly useful and functional tool, and a year later, the new version of the mobile OS will come out, and it'll be "In the new version we've decided half of the operating system calls your software depends on are insecure, and three of the permissions that are necessary for your app to work no longer exist. Have fun rewriting the entire thing", after which the developer very reasonably says to hell with it, and goes back to writing software for an ecosystem that doesn't break every single user space application on a regular basis.
So yes, just by working in the mobile space, you're already accepting trade-offs in making robust software by the very nature of the ecosystem.
This. I also wonder when people will realize that having more RAM doesn't mean having to use it all (electron, looking at you)
I think most operating systems today are designed to make opportunistic use of available RAM but also fuck electron
Yes, it's called page cache and you won't find a mainstream operating system without it.
I regularly get to a 30gb page file on my desktop though...it has sufficient space but still
That's a different mechanism. A "page" is just a fixed-size portion of memory, e.g. 4 KiB, which is a convenient size for your OS to do its whole memory management with. And then there's many things the OS does with such pages.
Page caching keeps files that processes loaded from your hard drive in RAM, after the process doesn't need it anymore.
What you're referring to is kind of the opposite. The OS allows processes to reserve more memory than there is physically available. This is called "virtual memory".
When processes do that, then some of those ~~portions of memory~~ pages get put onto your hard drive, and only get put back into RAM (replacing something else) when the process actually accesses those pages.
The fundamental result isn't much different, there's 30 GB of populated memory being sent to disk because these apps all over allocate and the os insists on sending it to disk even with 40% of real ram free.
Caching and Electron are two vastly different things.
What they're saying is that because of this caching, unused RAM is essentially just not a thing. Any process using lots of RAM will slow down everything else on your PC.
I was mainly just making a playful remark about electron being stinky
It's still not the same. The caches can be quickly evicted, but the RAM hoarded by a shitty app cannot be reclaimed without killing the app.
Edit: downvotes, no replies. Y'all just salty that I'm right?
ok?
This is expected behaviour though?
Realisticly, it would be beyond wrong to have every file in ram at all times, or process's every file to any extend when it is not in immediate use or you are in a search field or link/back link Dialog.
Try copy pasting 2GB of data into your vim and you will find it takes quite a while for everything to be pasted. When you drag and drop via the UI in obsidian and you do that with thousands of files, then this is not very surprising to slow your application. Assuming obsidian wants to make the files available as soon as possible, I presume it parses/indexes them immediately one after the other instead of one big block.
My vault is about 1.5k files, all interlinked in some way (ignoring larger pictures or PDFs). Making a new vault and drag and dropping all of them in lags quite a bit for quite a while, but once everything is loaded its fine.
Yeah, if it's only about the import, then obviously it would be nice, if it was more robust with that, but it's not nearly as bad.
I really hope this isn't the case, at the rate I've been using Obsidian i will probably hit the thousands later this year.
But do you plan on importing thousands of files at once?
@recklessengagement @graphito I have some 15K notes in Obsidian and it runs fine. That said, my system specs are at the higher end… that also said, it‘s Electron, it can‘t grab ressources indefinitely.
My vault is a couple thousand files, works fine!
Only have a few plugins though
Might want to crosspost to [email protected] too
Unfortunately, it's pretty much pointless to point out real widespread problems to the official communities.
It's populated by crowd of paid shills and dog pilers who will gladly blame user for any problem, refuse to admit the problem exist, contradict your words and just straight up lie using marketing double speak & sophistry
You can't make person to see, when she's paid not to see
Unofficial Lemmy community for https://obsidian.md
It's not the official community, that'd be the forums and maybe the Discord, so I'm confused. Do you mean communities specifically focused on it are likely to have that kind of person too?
Also, the image you posted seems to defend Obsidian from criticism, so I was pretty surprised to get a reply from you talking about shills, about negative reception to criticism because the people in the conversation are paid actors.
Putting all my cards on the table, I am an Obsidian user who enjoys it. I saw this post in PKMS got lots of upvotes, and my motive here is Fediverse engagement, which is why I thought this would make a nice crosspost.
Also, the image you posted seems to defend Obsidian from criticism, so I was pretty surprised to get a reply from you talking about shills, about negative reception to criticism because the people in the conversation are paid actors.
The picture I posted, is an example how community leaders react to problems:
- they make you repeat yourself (imo they hope you'd get tired and drop asking for help)
- "it's not a big deal" aka "deny problem exists 🙈"
- "poor people problem" aka "victim blaming" 2.1 "nah, bro, it works for me" — "been using the software for ages, never had any problem"
- "everyone doing it" — whataboutism and comparing oneselves with the worst players
On the picture you can see 0 and 3, but not many people care enough to encounter all the responses. It's much easier just to give up than get any bit of helpful advice.
Putting all my cards on the table, I am an Obsidian user who enjoys it. I saw this post in PKMS got lots of upvotes, and my motive here is Fediverse engagement, which is why I thought this would make a nice crosspost.
Cheers to you, mate. If you wanna discuss Obsidian problems in the open -- be my welcomest guest. However, I gotta warn you to brace yourself, you might encounter a lot of resistance and bigotry.
Hey, thanks for the clarification.