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2026-11-01 | 🧮 Characterizing Obsidian Publishes 🤖

🎯 What the History Can Tell Us

📚 The previous investigation described plausible Enveloppe bottlenecks from its source code, but it had no measurements from my own publishing workload.
🔎 This follow-up uses the publisher merge commits in this repository to describe the history and size of the changes that reached the published site.
⚠️ Git records successful repository changes and their commit timestamps, not how long Enveloppe spent making them.

🔬 What I Counted

🧭 I inspected first-parent history from the first publisher-tagged merge on April 15, 2024 through the latest one on November 1, 2026.
📦 That history contains 6,842 publisher-tagged merge commits, numbered through publisher pull request 7556.
📝 I counted each “PUSH NOTE” and “PUSH ATTACHMENT” line in those merge messages as a manifest entry, not as a unique note, a byte count, or a timed operation.
🗂️ The manifests often repeat names such as index.md because different folders have their own index notes.
📅 All dates below use the timestamps recorded on those merge commits.

📈 The History at a Glance

📆 From April through December 2024, the history contains 475 publisher merges, 3,080 note-manifest entries, and 13 attachment-manifest entries.
📆 During 2025, it contains 4,712 publisher merges, 37,598 note-manifest entries, and 37 attachment-manifest entries.
📆 From January through November 1, 2026, it contains 1,655 publisher merges, 54,904 note-manifest entries, and 3,768 attachment-manifest entries.
📊 Among merges with at least one note-manifest entry, the median batch was 6 entries in 2024, 3 in 2025, and 18 in 2026.
🧮 Those yearly counts describe recorded merge messages, not the number of Enveloppe runs or the number of notes scanned.

🧺 Recent Batches

🗓️ Across August 3 through November 1, 2026, there were 156 publisher merges on 86 active days, with at most 6 on any one day.
📝 Those merges recorded 15,229 note-manifest entries and 787 attachment-manifest entries.
📏 The median nonempty note manifest had 43 entries, and the median nonempty attachment manifest had 5.5 entries.
🪶 The most recent merge, number 7556, listed 30 note entries and 1 attachment, and changed 31 repository paths.
📦 Two larger recent merges listed 242 notes and 8 attachments, changing 338 paths, and 241 notes and 9 attachments, changing 302 paths.
🧩 Those diffs include generated site indexes and other supporting files as well as published notes and attachments, so changed-path totals are not equivalent to note counts.

🐢 What This Says About Slow Publishing

📈 The recent history does show substantial and sometimes large batches reaching the site, with a much higher median number of note-manifest entries in 2026 than in 2025.
🖼️ The logged attachment volume also rises sharply in 2026, which makes attachment processing a reasonable thing to measure.
🕰️ The record includes multiple publisher merges per day, but their spacing is not an upload duration: a merge timestamp says when the repository change landed, not when publishing started.
🚫 There is no per-run start or finish time, no count of notes examined or skipped, and no timing split between discovery, conversion, attachments, and GitHub requests.
🧠 The history therefore supports “large batches and attachments may matter” as a hypothesis, but it cannot show that either one caused the reported wait.

⚠️ Important Limits

🕳️ About half of all publisher-tagged merges have no “PUSH NOTE” entry in their merge message.
🔍 A recent example with no note-manifest entries still changed a daily reflection, so a zero-entry manifest does not mean that no repository work happened.
🔢 Exactly 250 note entries is the largest manifest size observed, appearing in 101 merges.
❔ That repeated maximum could reflect a limit in what the manifest records or a real batch size; the repository alone cannot distinguish the two.
📏 Manifest entries also do not report content size, embedded-file traversal, Dataview work, retries, GitHub API calls, rate limits, or whether an unchanged note was considered.
📉 The exceptionally busy history includes 272 publisher-tagged merges on June 2, 2025, so a long-term average would not be a good estimate of a typical recent day.

🧪 What to Collect for Enveloppe

⏱️ The most useful next data point is one ordinary slow run with a wall-clock start and finish time, the installed Enveloppe version, and the number of shared notes selected.
🧭 For each run, record time spent discovering notes, converting content, processing embeds and attachments, and making GitHub requests.
📊 Also record notes pushed, skipped, unchanged, and failed; attachment counts and bytes; API request counts and latency; retries; and rate-limit responses.
🧪 Comparing those measurements across a small batch and a typical full batch would tell us whether time grows with note count, media, conversion work, or network activity.
🎯 The repository history gives Enveloppe maintainers concrete evidence that recent batches can involve dozens to hundreds of note-manifest entries and many attachments, while timing telemetry would turn that workload evidence into a performance diagnosis.

📚 Research Notes

🔎 I examined first-parent commit subjects, merge-message manifests, timestamps, and actual changed paths for representative small and large batches.
🧾 The snapshot ends at publisher merge 7556, dated November 1, 2026.
🛡️ No publish-duration logs or per-note Enveloppe diagnostics are stored in the repository history I could inspect.

📚 Book Recommendations

• 📘 Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
• 📗 The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt
• 📙 Building Evolutionary Architectures by Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, and Patrick Kua
• 📕 Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software by Michael Nygard