Performance & Slowness

Time Garden has a known speed cost — that's the trade-off for everything it does automatically. But sometimes things get unreasonably slow. This page is the list of things that actually help.

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Where Slowness Usually Comes From

In rough order of likelihood:

1. Many plugins running together — Time Garden depends on ~18 community plugins
2. Large image files in the vault — galleries scale linearly
3. A weak machine running a too-big AI model — see Choosing Your AI Models
4. Large monthly / quarterly notes generating fresh — heavy template + dataview load
5. Sync churn — your sync tool fighting Obsidian for file access
6. Old Obsidian / plugin versions

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Quick Wins

1. Update Obsidian

Obsidian releases optimizations regularly. Check Obsidian → Check for Updates (or download the latest from obsidian.md).

2. Update Time Garden

Same logic. See Updating Time Garden for the exact steps.

3. Compress Your Images

The single biggest performance lever in image-heavy vaults. A daily note with a 12 MB photo is dragging the whole month's gallery down.

• Mac: tools like ImageOptim (free) or just opening in Preview and exporting as a JPEG with reduced quality
• Windows: FileOptimizer (free)
• Cross-platform: Squoosh (browser-based)

Aim for daily photos under 1 MB each. The visual difference at typical viewing sizes is invisible.

4. Close Notes You're Not Using

Each open tab keeps its dataview queries and chart scripts alive. Close tabs you've moved past — performance will visibly recover.

5. Disable Plugins You Don't Use

Time Garden ships with a curated set, but if you've added other plugins that you've forgotten about, they're each costing you. Obsidian Settings → Community Plugins → toggle off any you don't actively need.

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When Period Notes Take Forever To Open

If opening a monthly or quarterly note hangs for 10+ seconds:

1. First open is always slowest — Obsidian compiles the templates and runs all dataview queries. Subsequent opens are faster (cached).
2. AI buttons trigger heavy work — opening the note itself shouldn't trigger AI, only your clicks should.
3. If a specific period note is always slow even on re-open, try deleting and re-creating it (your previous content is lost — copy it out first). Sometimes a note picks up cruft over time.

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When Generating A New Period Note Takes Forever

Templates are big, especially yearly. A first-time generation:

Anything significantly longer than this means something's off:

• Disk full? Check available space.
• Antivirus scanning every Obsidian write? Add an exclusion for your vault folder.
• Sync tool fighting Obsidian? Pause sync during template generation.

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When AI Operations Take Forever

If you're waiting longer than this:

• Your model is too big for your machine. Switch to a smaller one in Choosing Your AI Models (phi4-mini runs fast everywhere).
• Your context window is overloaded. Tune chunking — lower detailedWordCount, lower maxTokensPerOperation.
• Background processes are stealing CPU/GPU. Close other heavy apps while AI runs.

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When The Whole App Lags

If Obsidian itself feels sluggish (typing lag, clicking lag, scrolling lag):

1. Reload without saving: Cmd/Ctrl + P → "Reload app without saving". A clean restart of just the editor.
2. Clear the workspace: close all open tabs, restart Obsidian.
3. Reduce graph view complexity: if you keep the graph view open, large vaults hammer the renderer. Close it when not using.
4. Disable hover-preview: in Settings → Page preview, you can turn it off if it's lagging.

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When Mobile Is Slow

See Opening Time Garden on Your Phone for the mobile-specific tips. The short version: capture on mobile, reflect on desktop.

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Nuclear Options

If nothing has helped:

Reduce Vault Size

• Move old daily notes' images to an Archive folder and remove them from your daily entries (the galleries on past notes will lose those images, but everything will be faster)
• Compress every existing image (a one-time pain, lifelong gain)

Start Fresh Vault, Import Slowly

If your existing vault has accumulated cruft:

1. Create a fresh Time Garden vault
2. Copy your 01 Daily/ etc. folders over
3. Don't copy anything from .obsidian/ except your customizations
4. Re-install your plugins clean

Reach Out

If you've tried everything, send Karl a note with your specs and the symptom. He genuinely cares.

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Up Next

• Choosing Your AI Models — the biggest AI-performance lever
• Daily note bugs — visual bugs (often confused with performance)
• Updating Time Garden — newer versions are usually faster