Deleting notes is slow

[saitatter]

I was in the process of writing a Playnite extension that can sync information (games and attributes) into Trillium by leveraging notes and labels (I use this in conjunction with table View). I had around 1000 notes, no relations, they were all parented under the same parent note and I selected all of them and pressed delete. This took quite a while, and I'm not sure why, there was no cloning/branching involved so I was expecting it to be faster. Now I'm wondering if this will affect the extension performance when I'm going to add a delete notes endpoint and use etapi for that.

[dosubot[bot]]

Deleting a large number of notes in Trilium is slow because each deletion triggers a series of backend operations: notes are recursively marked as deleted (soft-delete), and the system updates history, search indexes, and cleans up related data for each note individually. Even without relations or clones, bulk deletions iterate over every note and perform transactional cleanups, which adds significant overhead for large batches like 1000 notes. This same logic applies whether you delete notes via the UI or through the etapi endpoint, so your extension will likely experience similar performance characteristics when deleting many notes at once wiki, API code.

There aren’t documented best practices for optimizing bulk deletions, but you may see better results by batching deletes (e.g., deleting in smaller groups rather than all at once) and ensuring your hardware is sufficient, as CPU and disk speed can impact performance search performance thread. If you notice severe slowness or errors, check for possible note tree corruption, as this can also cause deletion problems corruption thread.

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