I need to know what are the limits of Joplin. How many noteooks, notes golbally and per notebok, tags, and database size, in specific numbers if possible.
I'm adding new notes, attachments, clips, tags and sometimes new notebooks too on a daily basis. So I wan to decide the best way to use Joplin without facing any kind of problems in the future. The future here might be a decade or two.
I assume these are things programmers know beforehand.
I'm using portable version on Windows 10 and not interested in synicng at all.
And please don't ask me how many notes you prdouce and how many notes humans can produce per day.. this is not the issue here.. I just want to know the capabilites and limits of Jpolin.. Thats all
Thanks in advance
Maximum database size according to Implementation Limits For SQLite is 281 terabytes.
EDIT
Actually, this is not very relevant as attachment aren't stored in sqlite database.
I do not think anyone can tell you what the limit is.
The size of attachments is only limited by your disk. The maximum size of single note is limited by your RAM as Joplin will load it all to memory.
The maximum numbers of tags, notebooks, and notes all depend on RAM as well for the same reason.
Even if there is a hard limit (like sqlite DB size limit I mentioned), practically speaking Jolin will stop being usable long before that. For instance working with tags becomes slow once you have more than about a 1000 (Add tags to a note is extrem slow · Issue #4251 · laurent22/joplin · GitHub)
Number of notes or notebooks is not really an issue as far as I know, since the UI is optimised to handle this. For example the note list can load thousands of notes without problems.
There's this tag issue, although hopefully that will be fixed some day.
Another more annoying issue, which is planned to be fixed, is the number of sync items as certain sync targets such as OneDrive have a limited number of files per folder, which has been reached by some users. So eventually I'd like to shard the data to go around this issue.
But in practice some users already have millions of items or more and it works fine, so normally you're fine for many years to come.
Thank you both for your prompt reply.
However, I'm really 'frightened' by that tags issue.. 1000 tags is a number I'm sure I'll reach in a couple of months or so. I can't work without tags, so they may reach few thousands may be even 10 or 20 over time.
So I need to know if it is a 100% solvable problem or not. And if it is solvable, when do you expect to solve it. Forgive me if I'm pressing but this is a very pressing and cirical issue for me. I need to know to decide to remain with Joplin (as I really hope cuz I love it) or start looking for another solution or different workflow.
Thanks in advance
Just to be clear.. The problem with the 1000+ tags is just a dealy for a few seconds during which Jopling might be irresponsive of freezing then it goes back to normal behaviour, or is it bigger than that?
I'm really wondering how people are using tags. People are supposed to remember tags. If you are able to remember 20,000 tags, you don't need a note taking app. If you don't, the tags are useless.
One person had 8 times more tags than notes.
Tags are supposed to be used to categorize notes, not to find a single note out of a myriad of notes. How does this make any sense? One searches for a tag, the result set decreases, adds another tag, the result set decreases again, and one throws so many tags at it until one note remains?
Hmm, there's a fantastic way to retrieve a single note. It's called global search.
I'm sorry, I just don't get it.
A different workflow might be a good idea. Not because of Joplin, but in general.
I don't want to tell you how to use tags, but you might want to think about why and how you are using tags. Take a color for instance. You can have tags for 16.7 million colors, or you could organize them in certain color groups, like red, blue, green, and a few more. You don't need to differentiate between Cantaloupe Melon and Tea Rose. If you do, you could use the hex codes as well. Do you understand where I'm getting at?
I mentioned above that I don't get how some people use tags. That's why I did some research on what the different options are to tag knowledge/notes/files/whatever.
I came acrosss a few articles along the way that made sense to me.
None of them said anything about thousands of tags.
As an example, here's a rather old blog post which I liked a lot, since the usage of tags was consistently applied and it's easy to adjust to one's own needs.
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Thanks for your comment, I've read that blog a while ago and lots of others mainly related to Evernote, since it has the strongest taggign system ever till now (despite Evernote itself is dying).
Of course, because none of them deals with researches in vast interrealted fields like humanites, which is my case. Most of them are related to the use of notes and tags in blog writing, youtube video making or business oriented matters.
If you are constantly dealing with materials that fall under several categories (the same single note can be put under several notebooks or classified under different categories), a tagging system is your only solution. Hope this responds to your curiousity about people using lots of tags.
Besides, as I mentioned before, the issue here is not how I, or any other human being is using notes or tags, the issue is Joplin limitations.
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Everything has limitations, including every app.
It would be impossible for any app to cater to every extreme fringe use case. And yes, I'd classify 1000+ tags as very fringe. Without a hierarchical tag structure, 1000+ tags becomes even more fringe. Most users will not remember all their tags long before the 1k mark. And while you could look them up, it's a waste of time (for most) when a powerful search function is available to help you locate notes.
Evernote was a huge proponent of tagging and pushed tags over notebooks for organization (EN doesn't have nested notebooks, which has been a source of frustration for many users). Now the current CEO is saying that only 2% of users are regularly using tags.
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I don't understand why people leave the main point (Joplin limitations- which is a legal question anyone would ask about any app.. it is a legitimate question I suppose.. @Laurent himself didn't complain about it) and turn the topic to the legitimacy of using or not using a 1000+ tags.. If I'm asking about this issue it means I have to use it, even if the CEO of Evernote or of even the UN says a few people use it. the 2% are people.. may be a minority, but just because they are a minority doesn't mean thay have to be taught to think or work in any other way just because some people don't understand how they work.
I don't have to explain the way I work in details. The question was simple.. is it or is it note safe to use few thousadns of tags in Joplin.. How hard is it to understand the question or to respond?
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Easy to understand, hard to respond.
You've already received the best answers that the devs can give you. The exact limitation numbers are hard enough to consider impossible to come up with. It is now up to you to decide if you're comfortable with that or not.
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I believe it's just a delay at 1k tags. However there's no guarantee that things stay the same as you increase the number of tags.
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Since an earlier response said that Joplin limits are related to RAM size, does your chosen machine have as much RAM as possible? If not is it worth maximising it?
In the past I've hit RAM limits with data and found that nothing actually stops, but the response slows down as the OS takes appropriate steps to push more into swap files. I would imagine that Joplin will experience similar behaviour. After all, that's under the control of the OS and not the application, and Joplin will be treated just like everything else, including the sometimes oversized linguistic structures one of my systems manages to create.
I belive this is true for the overall operation of Joplin, but not for the tags number. As stated by roman and laurent, this is an internal structure issue of the app.
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roman's comment was about slowdown when Joplin hit somewhere around 1000 tags, and about the importance of RAM because a lot gets loaded. The only limit I can see quoted is the SQLite limit which is so far beyond what a PC/Mac would be able to directly support it's essentially meaningless.
My reading of the responses here suggests that there is no practical limit to the number of notes other than that imposed by the database used which has a huge and built-in limit that you're not going to hit. Also performance will be affected by the number of tags and notebooks and the size of any individual note you're using at the time.
Machine performance is as much dark art as science as work has taught me over the years. These days it will be affected by web browsers (particularly but not exclusively Chrome), all other apps loaded whether they're running or not and the huge number of code fragments loaded by the operating system. More RAM is always good if you're dealing with a lot of data and SSDs will make the machine respond faster. These days more applications have soft limits than useful hard ones in that they gradually lose performance rather than just plain stop working at all.
If you have a need for indefinitely large amounts of well indexed data, then Joplin may not be the best solution. In fact you may be looking more at an enterprise-capable knowledge management solution which is a whole new world. The ones I've experienced are solutions for a different order of problem than Joplin (no insult to Joplin here) and the cost of ownership is high as a result.
To answer the question of "why would someone need so many tags?" - I will offer some information around that for my use case:
I currently have around 10 years of notes in Joplin, imported from Evernote last year, and I create on average around 125 notes per month. I currently have around 950 tags, but I have not noticed a slowdown on Windows, Android or iOS (iPad). I am a little concerned I may see some performance issues moving forward.
Why do I need so many tags? I am in product management, and I use tags for customers, technologies, products and releases. It is very useful to create a note that deals with a certain topic, and then tag that with customers who are affected by it, products that they have, etc. This makes searching and filtering by tags very useful for me. It would make no sense to create sub-notebooks for this use case (although I do use sub-notebooks for other organizational benefits)
I really only create 10-20 tags per month, so it isn't a large concern of mine, but I do want to make the point that some people DO use tags extensively as part of their workflows.
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The slowdown I mentioned occurs when you change tags on multiple notes at once. You'll see it if you try to tag a 1000 notes at once for instance. As long as you don't do this you should be fine.
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I notice with so many tags only the problem with the slow tagging. Otherwise I have no problems yet.
Only in the mobile app the tags are not really usable.
The slowdown I mentioned occurs when you change tags on multiple notes at once. You'll see it if you try to tag a 1000 notes at once for instance. As long as you don't do this you should be fine.
Ahh, yes I do not anticipate any issues there. Thanks for the information!
You wouldn't need to remember tags if you'd have a predictive search system, like the one we have for the journalists in our newspapers and radios (https://elpais.com, https://as.com, https://cadenaser.com ....) where they can choose among more that 200.000 tags. I think in this thread should be specified two things: the maximum number of tags that can exists and the maximum number of simultaneous tags a note can have. The journalist have to write at least 3 chars from any position of the tags and the search tag services shows all the tags that match the substring.
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