Harper causes sustained high RAM usage in Obsidian, might be a memory leak.

Harper is the only one enabled

spiked to 1gb idles and 760mb

Describe the bug

Harper appears to cause a large RAM increase in Obsidian.

With no plugins, theme, or CSS enabled, Obsidian idles around 335-340 MB. When Harper is enabled, RAM jumps to about 840 MB or higher. It does not settle back down. It keeps climbing and can reach 1 GB or more.

Disabling Harper does not fully release the memory during the same session. RAM only drops properly after relaunching Obsidian.

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

Open Obsidian on Windows.
Start with community plugins disabled.
Check idle RAM usage.
Enable Harper.
Watch Obsidian RAM usage.
Disable Harper.
Check whether RAM usage drops.
Relaunch Obsidian and check RAM usage again.
Expected behavior

Harper should not cause Obsidian RAM usage to jump from about 335-340 MB to 840 MB or more.

If Harper needs more memory while active, RAM usage should stabilize after loading. It should not keep increasing. Disabling Harper should release most of the added memory, or at least not leave Obsidian stuck near 1 GB until a full relaunch.

Screenshots

No screenshots available right now.

Platform

Obsidian on Windows 11 Pro 10.0.26100

Obsidian version: 1.12.7
Installer version: 1.12.7
Harper version: 2.0.0

Additional context

Startup data shows Harper took 369 ms to load.

RAM observations:

Idle with no plugins, theme, or CSS: 335-340 MB

Harper enabled: jumps to about 840 MB or higher

Harper enabled with other plugins active: RAM reached about 1 GB or more

After disabling Harper: RAM stayed high during the same session

After relaunching Obsidian: RAM dropped back down significantly

In a second isolated plugin test, Harper peaked around 800 MB when first enabled, then only dropped to about 698 MB. That is still much higher than the other tested plugin states.

This looks like either a memory leak or memory not being released correctly after Harper loads.

Reproduce the issue in Obsidian on Windows 11 using the reported Harper and Obsidian versions, comparing idle memory with Harper enabled and after disabling it. Confirm whether memory keeps growing and whether it is released only after relaunch; done means identifying the cause and preventing the reported sustained increase or retained memory.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.