Performance
Why Noteside is fast. Native, in-memory, and built to stay out of your way.
Noteside is built to be fast and light first, and to feel instant no matter how big your notebook gets.
A native shell
The app is a thin Rust shell (Tauri) drawing through your operating system's own webview. There's no background sync daemon and no separate indexer process. It launches instantly, stays light on memory, and ships as a small native binary.
Everything in memory
Opening a notebook scans it once into a rebuildable in-memory index. There's no database to build, migrate, or keep in sync. Search reads straight from memory, and your notes stay plain Markdown files on disk.
The numbers
Measured with cargo bench on a modern laptop:
| Operation | Result |
|---|---|
| Fuzzy file & title search | sub-millisecond at 10,000 notes; ~1 ms at 50,000 |
Content search (:grep) | typical query ~0.1 ms; worst case (a query matching nothing) ~0.5 ms at 1k notes, ~3 ms at 10k, ~15 ms at 50k |
| Opening a 10,000-note notebook | ~90 ms, one time (files read in parallel) |
| External edits | the watcher re-reads just the touched files |
| Scrolling the sidebar | virtualized past 100 notes, so only visible rows mount |
| Typing | never re-renders the UI; autosave is debounced off the keystroke path |
No database, no daemon, no indexer to wait on. The fast path is the only path.