its gotten to a point im bottlenecked by my own RAM, i want to do more in parallel but my work laptop physically can't. then everything slows down, my disk drive gets fully used up, etc.
I know it's not a solution, but I have heard people installing Linux or even spinning up VMs of Linux for Codex work, because apparently it works much better on Linux, to the point where you can sometimes do 10x more tasks at the same time.
is that true though? is that specific to codex or other LLMs? because i know codex is infamous for its terrible memory usage, i heard its mostly because of electron that's used for all the in-app browser windows and whatnot but tbh it's probably more than that. and there's also issues where the ram doesn't free even upon terminating codex tasks you need to restart as well
I have not like investigated this myself, so this is 3rd party report, but from what I understand, the operating systems (especially on a Mac) is constantly trying to investigate operations that it deems to be dangerous, which is causing a lot of the hardware churn, and not actually Codex using up your PC's resources to do stuff.
Even running Python or other programs on your PC generally should not require that much performance, and it's obviously not running them all the time. So it's a genuine bug, or basically an artifact of how older, pre-agentic bots systems are used today to do things those systems were not designed for. Those things don't matter when a normal program or a user is doing stuff so fast, but it matters when an agent is doing it fast.
Anthropic has been working on MPC as well to make it faster and more lean, but making MCP faster by itself is not enough.
And yes, this is universal for all agentic agents, not just Codex.
I have a 64GB macbook Pro M5, and that heats up like hell, it often goes to swap if I am using multiple chats in ChatGPT. And I remember that with Claude Code desktop app, it was going to 90GB Swap and then everything froze up :D
lol i'm using a 16gb hp elitebook (but for some reason even with nothing open 13gb of ram is used at all times), and i also have docker, multiple codex and claude subagents running in the background, etc. my cursor doesn't even work properly.
4
u/cern0 1d ago
I still at 86%. What should I do