In my Joplin database there are a lot of notes and tags – last time I synchronized to a new device I had 30,000 elements, I think. (Saying that, I don't really know what an element may be besides a note, a tag or a notebook.) Now there definitely are more. The Joplin folder in my Owncloud is 15.5 MB in size, while I don't use attachments.
Edit: Okay, so, Joplin on the laptop is done, now the numbers match those on the phone – I guess the number 30,000 I had in memory (and the larger number on the laptop while synching) were somehow produced by going over elements multiple times. Maybe that is caused by restarts.
Joplin is a great app I think. In daily use there are no problems at all. These high numbers do mean that setting up Joplin on a device is a hassle. My laptop is sitting there for hours, on my phone I need to leave it with the touchscreen on or else the synchronization halts. Only then I can use the program to enter or reference notes.
I don't know if I overlooked a similar topic. If so, it is because I didn't know how else to search for it. Other topics on big numbers mention something in the thousands – in that range I wouldn't run into these problems. Also, this makes me believe that my use is probably a rare kind. I am using a note taking technique that is inspired by Zettelkasten, so I tend to make a lot of new notes and not to add to existing ones.
In other apps the notes in the notebooks synchronized when I opened them, which sometimes took a bit of time out of the work flow – but it also meant that frequently used notebooks were synchronized anyway and ones that weren't used didn't clog up resources. Maybe something like this would be effective?
Unless I'm mistaken, there have been ideas floating around regarding the first sync - like implementing a feature of Joplin Server where it would just package older notes into a bundle and send them all at once to greatly improve perf.
I really don't know if what you suggest can be implemented. I'm not 100% sure and might be wrong here, but I think when you enable E2EE, even note metadata are encrypted. (I gave this a quick look and at a first glance, it seems to be the case.)
That would make it impossible to know which notebook a note belongs to, without downloading and decrypting it first.
There's also the fact that Google Drive or WebDav probably will let you query the file's info (like the name or modification timestamps), but not its contents; so selecting just the notes for a specific notebook might not be possible.
Okay, so, Joplin on the laptop is done, now the numbers match those on the phone – I guess the number 30,000 I had in memory (and the larger number on the laptop while synching) were somehow produced by going over elements multiple times. Maybe that is caused by restarts.