Can Anki handle more cards?

Anki Help
1

Hi all,

I’m learning a foreign language and currently using Anki to study sentence cards. Right now, I have about 50,000 cards — each with a single sentence.

The problem is: at this scale (50k cards), Anki is already noticeably slowing down. But ideally, I’d like to increase the number of sentences by 10x or even 100x — aiming for 500k to 5 million cards — to accelerate vocabulary acquisition.

My questions are:

  • What can I do to make this work?
  • Are there known performance tweaks, add-ons, or workflows that make large decks more manageable?
  • For folks who have built or used decks of this size, what does your setup look like?

Thanks in advance!

2

Are there limits on file sizes on AnkiWeb?

Collections on AnkiWeb are limited to a compressed size of 100MB, and an uncompressed size of 250MB. This includes the text on your cards and the scheduling information, but does not include sounds/images, as they are stored separately.

Most users will never reach the limit. 25,000 average-sized cards and several years of review history will take up about 25MB, so to hit the limit you usually need to either be copying large amounts of text into each card, or filling your collection with hundreds of thousands of new cards that you aren’t actually studying.

At the moment there are no limits on the size of your media, although the size of individual media files is limited to 100MB.

As the usage of Anki and AnkiWeb increases, at some point a pricing system may be introduced where basic, low-capacity accounts are free and heavier users can pay more for more space.

If you have hit the collection size limit, you will see messages about the collection being in an inconsistent state when you do a one way upload to AnkiWeb. It is not possible to increase the limit, because such large collections slow down AnkiWeb for other users. If you have imported a dictionary’s worth of content, you will need to move some unused cards to a separate deck, export the deck, and then delete the deck from your collection. After doing so, Tools>Check Database can be used to free up space that was taken by the deleted cards.

3

First, make sure you understand that Anki is storing your notes, with instructions for how to display the cards, not the cards themselves. A ridiculous number of cards might not mean a ridiculous number of notes.

At 50K cards, if you’re having performance issues it’s unlikely related to the size of your database.

  1. Have you checked how big your database is? I don’t see an AnkiWeb account associated with you, so I can’t check that for you, but the bottom of the AnkiWeb page is the easiest place to check your collection size – https://ankiweb.net/decks .
  2. Have you run Tools > Check Database?
  3. Have you otherwise tried to troubleshoot your performance issues? Troubleshooting - Anki Manual

There is a hard-limit on collection size for syncing to AnkiWeb – Are there limits on file sizes on AnkiWeb? - Anki FAQs – but other than that, any limits are a bit theoretical. It’s also very hard to reach even that syncing limit unless you have (a) a decade or more of review history, or (b) a runaway amount of HTML hidden in your notes.

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4

Ah, thanks for the clarifications, I can take a look at these links.

Also, for the most part, the area where I experience the slowest performance is in the browser. Any ideas on why this might be?

5

That’s what suggestion #3 is about!

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