Real, practical limit to number of files
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what do you expect the real, practical limit to be for the number of files the app can deal with and still remain snappy and responsive.
some have Apple Notes with 2000 or 3000 or more notes and it becomes unusable. if one were to move those notes as individual files into nvultra, what would be the practical usable limit???
thank you..... loved nvalt for years, and now dedicated to nvultra
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(Usual caveat that performance depends on the machine, and how busy the CPU is, etc....)
I use on the order of 20-30 folders (not all at once, and some more frequently than others), with the larger ones being in the neighborhood of 1000 files, and it is lightning fast for me. I don't like having everything in a single folder (part of the impetus for moving away from NV/nvAlt for me personally).
Not to speak for Brett, but I believe he uses a more "monolithic" approach of a single folder of several thousands of notes and the only time he has told me of any performance issues are when I have tweaked something or added something new, and need to make some improvements to the performance.
My "large test folder" has over 6000 files in it (of various lengths), and it works very quickly for me (but perceptibly not as fast as my usual folders). The caveat being that when I need to reindex the folder, it takes a bit of time to get through all of those files, but that is because I delete the cached indices periodically when I am testing things. It's rare that new functionality requires an update to the underlying cache file structure (which does require reindexing).
The search algorithm I built was specifically designed to quickly search a large number of files with incremental searching while you type. The trade off is that it does not support regex or other "complex searches", but I think for most users the need for that is quite rare. It can handle basic boolean logic in the queries (AND, OR, NOT), though this could make searches slower with really large folders since it is effectively running multiple searches.
So on my machine (2014 16GB Mac mini), a folder of 6000+ files works fine.
PS> Search speed is proportional to number of files, but not to length of files. So searching a folder of really long PDFs is still quite fast. Indexing a file (obviously) is proportional to the length of the file, and PDFs are slower than text files.
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