Reasonable database sizes

[Spliff]

I originally had about 50,000 items in my main UR database, with 4 secondary databases. I then imported one of these into my main database, so I got about 70,000 items in there, size 1.5 GB (with item rich text 5.0 GB) (It's a little bit less since UR gives the numbers in bytes.)

Everything continued to work smoothly. Speaking of a "traditionally-storing" WD Red HDD here (and i7 with 16GB of work memory); ALL findings of mine may be VERY different if you have your databases on an SSD:

I then imported another of my secondary databases, with about 55,000 items, for a total of 123,000 items, making it 2.12 GB and an item rich text of 9.43 GB.

This seemed to work quite acceptable - but not really well anymore - for a day or two, then (without further additions except for some dozen new items in my ordinary workflow) I got lags of many seconds and even minutes, even for very simple things, e.g. creating a new item, moving an item, etc.

Thus I deleted the imported database from the main database and did a "Compact and Repair", and, with just under 75,000 items, it's smooth again.

I tried to "blow up" my main database in this way in order to get the benefit of inter-linking items or even sub-trees (i.e. the parent items of others) within my main database, and while linking to other databases is technically possible, links within the same database work much more smoothly, e.g. I had hoped to do inter-links between special software items and the subjects where I use that software, for "hints and tricks" and such to be readily available where I need them, instead of them being discarded into my "IT" database.

I now do copies of the original items instead, but this implies de-syncing when I "update" them "here", instead of "there", thus my hope for the "very big" database.

Other users with similar problems - most will not encounter my size problems though - could load the secondary database automatically, together with their main database, and then just work on the - linked - "original" item over there.

This being said, it can be read in the web - may be true or not - that some "competitors" become unstable in the (higher) 4-digit item range, and the above at least proves there is NO size problem with 75,000 items even on a HDD with UR.