zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Nathaniel Beaver <nathanielmbeaver@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 09/19/2016 01:11 AM, Robert Zelník wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am a very happy Zim user, I use it for many years as my personal
> external memory. I mostly use flat page structure, that means most of
> the pages are in the same level of hierarchy and under the same
> folding/parent page.

I also used to do this. Unfortunately, I found it does not play to Zim's 
strengths.

What is the size in kilobytes of the largest pages in your notebook?

> This general notebook contains for about 3500 pages
> in the main level (with some subpages under some of these main pages)
> and it causes few (8-9) seconds of freeze after each new click on a
> page. I also have some much smaller notebooks and there the freeze
> doesn't occur. What should I do to get it faster? Would be helpful to
> divide the notebook in multiple sub-sections, or should I divide it in
> multiple notebooks?

I would recommend dividing into multiple sub-sections, not dividing into 
multiple notebooks.

I have good performance on a single notebook that totals around 13 MB, 
but almost all of the pages are less than 8 kilobytes, and no single 
page is more than 12 KB. There are slightly more than 1000 pages in 
about 400 directories.

This might sound difficult to navigate, but because of the structured 
hierarchy I've built up and the "Jump to" command, it is quite manageable.

Normally a deep hierarchy would be constraining, but because Zim updates 
internal links automatically, there is less cost to re-arranging pages. 
I use a hybrid of categorizing by year/date and categorizing by subject.

Keeping things in separate categories also helps avoid unintentional 
duplication, another problem I experienced when trying to keep 
everything in a few large pages.

> What could cause the freeze? Is it some kind of
> indexing?

The task list plugin does index every file, but even that only takes a 
few seconds to start up for me, and usually has a latency less than a 
second when updating.

I think the main issue you are experiencing is that Zim is both a text 
editor and a markup language renderer, and this does not mix well with 
large single pages.

Since Zim pages are just text files, you could use a text editor that 
does not try to render the pages, but that would remove most of the 
benefits of Zim. However, with some care, you can use a different text 
editor when splitting up the larger pages.

For example, you could create several "stub" pages with Zim, then close 
Zim and use your favorite text editor to cut and paste sections of the 
larger pages into the smaller stub pages.

Just make sure you don't move any internal links or embedded images 
during this process, because Zim won't be able to fix them automatically.

Also, I would recommend making a full backup of your notebook before 
undertaking this process.

> --
> Robert Zelník
> http://about.me/robert.zelnik
>
>
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