why is obsidian slow to load

Its been a few days I had been observing that obsidian was taking a lot of time to load on windows. so to narrow down this issue I did the following.

• uninstalled existing obsidian version
• cleared appdata local and roaming folders for obsidian where obsidian store the information
• download latest installer from obsidians website
• installed obsidian
• restarted my pc
• started obsidian

much to my dismay even after a clean install with no vault loading on the start it was taking 15~18 seconds to just start obsidian or even a vault with zero documents. there were no community plugins involved here as well.

all my other applications are loading fast and I have a very modern AMD Ryzen 5 5600x with 32GB of RAM and 3700 Ti GPU along with a very fast 7000MB/s nvme drive so yes PC hardware being a bottleneck is out of question.

found the culprit

One of the discord members suggested me to switch off my antivirus and check if that works and bingo as soon as I disabled my antivirus and started obsidian it loaded in the blink of an eye. I also ensured that while I had my antivirus disabled for few minutes as I tested this I disabled my internet connection.

the solution

add obsidian to antivirus whitelist or exclusion list. if you dont want to do that you can find a better efficient antivirus which would not slow down your app loading times. I will try and find a better alternative but till then I have my answer that its the antivirus which was the culprit here.

references

• Are slow Obsidian startups on Windows normal (esp. plugin-setup)? : ObsidianMD
• obsidian discord discussion