Curious, I have starting using Obsidian recently and one of the things that I love about it is that it's lightning fast on my systems, including startup time. Much snappier than other note-taking programs I've used, and than 95% of the programs altogether (only the likes of Notepad are faster).
Maybe it's because I don't have many notes yet and it becomes a behemoth if the vault gets too big?
I currently have 147 community plugins installed. Is your shitload bigger than my shitload? :-)
I don't have all of them enabled though. Only about 2/3. :-)
It's not only the number of enabled plugins that matters. Some graphical plugins eat almost no resources. But then there are other plugins that are constantly rescanning files and O is not necessarily "n", but worse than that.
You can start with setting up the following plugins to their full potential and see how it goes. :-)
Breadcrumbs
Dataview
Dynamic Table of Contents
Filename Heading Sync
Juggl
Link Favicons
Linter
Omnisearch
Spaced Repetition
Supercharged links
May I suggest giving Trilium notes a try? It's like opensource obsidian plus typed notes plus self hostable sync plus a web frontend for places where you can't install it.
It’s also dare-I-say-it too customizable for me. I just want it to look nice and do standard notes stuff without having to spend hours tinkering.
The only thing keeping me is that it is just markdown. I don’t like the idea of being locked in with the proprietary formats of other apps