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 — 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 — 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.