Thousands of notes with the same tag slows down search

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 17, 2013 at 04:14 PM

Simon, I’ve been tempted since I first saw your name in this forum to ask you if your surname is really Bolivar, and if you happen to be from Chile, but I can leave it for another time… :-)

On your subject, I’ve been using Evernote for several years and have more than 10,000 notes in my notebooks, many of them including rich content (mostly images and sometimes audio files). The database is about 1.4 Gbytes. I have a couple of hundred tags, organised in a hierarchy. As far as I see, none of my tags happen to have more than a couple of hundred items, but switching from a tag to the other takes less than a second, and this time seems independent of the number of items under the various tags I switch between.

Evernote uses SQLite as its infrastructure; I would say that both SQLite and Evernote have a tremendous user base and that if there were issues of scaleability they would have turned up long ago.

Depending on what you will want to do with your notes, Connected Text might offer more useful features, e.g. for organising them around specific scientific papers. In fact, there is little you can do with your notes after they are entered in Evernote, other than search them, tag them and edit them—you can of course select some and export them as HTML for use in other programs, but that’s it. But I believe that Evernote has the advantage in ease of collection of rich content, plus ubiquitous availability.