I added about 3,000 notes to my Drafts, and it is pretty much unusable. It seems like their database system isn’t designed to handle that many notes. It also won’t import all the notes that I select. I.e. I tried import 5,000 notes a few times, and each time some subset of that was imported.
My original 150 or so notes are still responsive in the interface (clicking between them is fast), but when I click between notes that are more recently added, it gets slower and slower, taking maybe 14 seconds to switch between notes.
Search is also painfully slow, typing the first character in the search field results in a pause of about 26 seconds before results are displayed. Typing more characters results in the same delay.
So in my view, it’s not cut out for working with thousands of notes. As they say, it’s where text starts - and seems like it shouldn’t be where it lives.
Have you tried posting about your experience over in the Drafts forum? I believe there are people who have very large note collections who don’t experience the issues you describe (and, in any case, I’d bet Greg would want to get your feedback so he can improve things).
This issue was addressed on the Drafts forum. The developer @agiletortoise said:
“ There are many people with many thousands of drafts in the app and we are not aware of any significant performance slow downs related to large stores.”
You can make them aware of my experience if you’d like.
I really don’t have a dog in this hunt.
I mainly tried it to answer @Nick_Fulgham question of what 10,000+ notes would be like, and out of my own curiosity.
I currently have 7468 notes and the interface never pauses, on iOS or Mac, and search is always instant. I did an import of over 7000 and it worked first time. It’s still as responsive as when I had a couple of hundred notes. I imported everything from Notes using the markdown Exporter tool.
I would definitely go to the developer and ask what could cause this, I imagine it’s some incompatible formatting or some form of corruption. The program can certainly handle much more than 3000.