I have been using Agenda for a couple of months, adding several notes every day. Now, with probably 100+ notes, switching between projects is quite slow. It can take several seconds to render.
Extrapolating out to what it will be like in a couple more months when I have twice as many notes, I am very nervous about investing more time (and content) into Agenda as my primary productivity tool.
Is there something I can do to improve this? Is there something you can do to improve this?
MacBook Pro (32GB RAM & Plenty of free disk space)
MacOS 10.14.5
Agenda 9.3 (116)
Have you spread your notes across different projects? Projects is one long stream of notes, so if you can have fewer notes in each project, that can certainly help.
Other things that may slow down loading of notes are lots of tags in a note, and attachments in a note. If you have either of those, it may explain why it is taking longer to load the notes to screen.
Thanks for the tips. I have about 15-29 projects, so the notes are moreor less distributed. I have used tags and mentions, but not extensively.
The problem is that I WAs planning to use this tool with likely a years worth of daily notes taking for work and home while adding probably 5-10 new notes each day. If you do the math, there’s no way this will scale.
Given the behavior, I am going to guess that Agenda it dynamically loading messages into memory/view each time. Could these be cached? Doesn’t seem like there would be much memory use as it’s mostly text.
Just to expand a little on how it works, notes are only loaded as they are brought on screen (or just off screen). So if you have a project with 1000 notes, and you don’t open it, there should be no performance cost at all. You can also archive projects to get them out of the way.
The main cost is bringing notes onto the screen. Things that make this expensive are attachments, tags, and large notes (eg multiple screens of text). If you have very large notes, you might consider splitting them into multiple smaller ones.
In terms of scaling over time, you shouldn’t see a problem, because
The app is always getting faster. As @mekentosj said, we’ve got a project lined up to streamline the layout engine
Generally you have an active set of projects. As long as you keep these a reasonable size, the performance should not get any slower. The projects you don’t visit should not cost anything.
If you have particular areas you find slow, let us know, just in case our lines are crossed.
Performance is a real problem for me also. I knew that in part this was because I have some notes with many screenshots. While I do have many projects, I do have some projects with many notes that I think I can divide into sub-projects. I am hopeful that will help. Thank you for the suggestion
I have the same issue. Although I don’t have too many notes as you do. Neither projects. So, I think it’s a very serious problem of scalability.
Note: it only happens on Desktop. On iOS I didn’t notice any delay opening notes.
Just a suggestion (I don’t know how it works at all): why don’t add an infinite scrolling or something? I mean, rendering only visible data and discover it when scrolling down. I think it’s a rendering issue on the screen, it has nothing to do with the size of the note.
Agenda has infinite scrolling. The problem is more that an Agenda note is quite a complex view, compared to, say, a Facebook post. It has to be edited, and has quite a few attached controls. It also has to be able to expand as you type text, which affects the notes above and below. All in all, it is just more complex than other apps in this regard.
That said, we have ideas for making the main notes list faster for scrolling etc. We plan to start on those improvements later in the year.
Agenda seems to get laggier over time (MacOS). Interaction which feel unacceptably slow include:
Opening the formatting popup
Creating a new note from the + button
Creating a new note from the calendar side bar
Line-returns in new notes
Switching between projects
i.e. much of the app’s key functionality feels laggy. My main project has 48 notes - so I don’t think it’s a note volume issue.
I opened up Ulysses next to Agenda on the same screen, and tried all the same (or nearest equivalent) actions in Ulysses. My Ulysses has many many more notes compared to Agenda, but it’s so much snappier to use.
Maybe this is YMMV thing. I love Agenda’s functionality and design, but on my i7 Macbook Pro it’s really laggy compared to other apps.
My preference would be a pause on new features so the dev team have some time to focus on performance.
My preference would be a pause on new features so the dev team have some time to focus on performance.
We do plan to have a performance focused stint later this year indeed. Right now it’s very much depending on the type of notes you have, with variables like number of notes, attachments, tags etc having quite a significant effect on performance. We hope to reduce this variability in future updates.
I’m also experiencing significant performance slowdowns. On Mac, it seems to occur across the app, on most interactions (switching projects, removing/adding items on the agenda, etc.). On iPad, it only seems to occur in my busiest projects; projects with fewer notes render quickly but lengthy ones lag horribly when scrolling.
It’s not a hardware issue; my iMac is a 2017 with 48GB memory and the iPad is a 2018 iPad Pro.
Like many of the other posters, I have many projects, though some certainly have 200+ notes. I don’t embed images or use the tags feature much; they’re mostly plain text with some hyperlinks, checklists, and \remind tags. Almost all of my notes are linked to a calendar event.
If there’s any kind of logging I can extract, happy to upload that. I’m a huge fan of Agenda and use it constantly at work, which is frankly the only reason I’m still using it. I wouldn’t tolerate performance like this from another app, but I find Agenda extremely useful.
It’s strange but although I too see some loss of performance scrolling through large projects (150+ notes), it is in no way hindering me from doing what I want to.
Most of the time I don’t really need to scroll though, I use the dropdown menu at the top of the note section to see where I want to go, or I do a search.
Recently I added a gazillion tags as well and this made it even easier to skip through information.
I just exported my largest project to Markdown and if I’m searching correctly it looks like I’m at about 1000 notes in that project alone. Seems like that might just be beyond what the app has been tested for?
I noticed the same slowdowns scrolling that project on my iPhone 11 Pro as well.
Anyone know if collapsing those notes would help performance? Not sure how much of the slowdown is rendering vs other stuff.
I just exported my largest project to Markdown and if I’m searching correctly it looks like I’m at about 1000 notes in that project alone. Seems like that might just be beyond what the app has been tested for?
Yes, 1000 notes is a lot. Agenda has to track those dynamically in a long list. There are optimisations of course, but it is not the same as 1000 notes in Apple Notes or Bear, because they only load one note at a time.
My advice would be to introduce more projects, and spread the notes over those. Use Categories and Sub-Categories to keep things organised.
