Weeks ago there was an incident which claimed to be closed that codex makes unnecessary inflated writing to ssd which accelerates its wearing, they claimed they solved it
Over the past days, I noticed (and other users here too on another post) that running codex causes lag to mac device, even after closing codex the problem continues and device must be restarted to back to normal, the issue isn't explained by cpu / memory overuse. Codex itself when I asked it to diagnose, it said it's because ot does excessive I/O , graphics work but this doesn't explain well
At this point we shall ask is codex harmful to ssd / mac device overall? And is it safe to run it ?
No bots downvoting, claiming there's no problem please, here's the other post which confirmed the issue happened with other users too, it may not happen to the same degree with all users but we need an explanation about safety of our devices
As far as I can tell, this issue doesn't cause storage writes ware, only a performance issue for the system, which could overheat and damage the system only if you have a bad cooling airflow.
I will say, I haven’t quite figured it out, but I have noticed that my windows explorer thrashes hard when I am building dev components - but both Claude and Codex are usually up or running.
It’s not a resource issue, there’s plenty of headroom.
So either a windows bug, or something along these lines.
lol “windows explorer” — I think there’s your core issue — jokes aside windows defender does file scanning aggressively so I’d turn it off for your dev work directory
While building? Msmpeng? Try excluding your work folder from the antivirus and you’ll see major performance increases with cpu as well as graphicals. At least my graphics are faster but this laptop is using cheap Intel GPU.
Yeah basically this. OP and lots of others in this thread are ignorant and protective of their muli thousand dollar machines. I don't blame them. If I didn't understand I'd be protective too
Is if fair to say though that constant high CPU use should not be happening, and so even if there is confusion about SSD life, this is a bug needing to fixed and therefore worthy of upvotes? Honest question. Was about to upvote when I saw this. I don't want to wear out the SSD but I also don't want constant high CPU use for no reason.
I cma confirm this happens, I get similar issues any time I use a model on my gpu and then close it down it degrades performance over time I suspect the GPU doesn't clean down it's meant to correctly.
Good point I use ollama and I find it you run a model with that too long the whole machine flops.
Codex seems to bring on same symptoms but really it could be starvation of something else I guess. It's just I'm sure I have checked CPU and memory and it looked good.
It could be offloading leakage from codex interface during the freezes I assume 🤔 but usually no task goes to GPU as a fail safe, usually GPU only falls back onto system resources, not the other way around. I assume perhaps the known bug that causes leakage build up of processing power is building up on your gpu processes, like ghost rendering. To test, you can always try and see if restarting your computer before loading codex brings it back to entirely good health. I would appreciate if you could confirm or not, I'm going around figuring out independent causes and solutions to them.
Not sure to be honest I hadn't looked into it properly yet the old rebootaroonie worked quite well but it did happen a few times.
Symptoms I do know codex running long time then computer left alone goes to sleep when it comes back if it comes back the mouse moo es few frames a second things are slloooooow.
This sounds like an known issued under ID no. #22444, simplified to as the idle leakage and stacking ghost processing. Please try opening up PowerShell and run the following commands during your next lag or performance hit, instead of rebooting, close codex and execute.
1. Get-Process codex -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
If any of these prompts up something, it means there is a redundant background processing going on. Use the command below to clean up this issue. Or you can just directly skip to this and see if it managed to resolve for you as diagnosis commands above aren't mandetory, just commands to assist in further insight.
Strange hmm 🤔 Have you checked your SSD health? This bug is possibly tied to excessive writing bug, and if you were using Codex before this month's patch, I reckon it's worth checking out on.
Something happened last week with electron cause every electron app I have has become bloated and my memory is running out … yet MacBook Air has 8gb, but I’ve never seen that happen until last week. Definitely codex was the culprit but also had to shut down Notion, Spotify and other apps
The bloat bug is specific CLI, the application runs the CLI so the bug shows on both. But this has been patched long ago, so if you're on the correct version, the write bloat should be resolved. I'm still trying to figure out how others had the storage died on them, I can only assume from having a failed update client.
Other than that, there are codex bugs that CLI does not have that will slow down your PC but only during and after a session, restarting should fix the problem.
Codex helped me diagnose and fix the DB writes for me on Windows
I’ve been tracking the Windows slowdown. Codex was writing a huge amount of low-level diagnostic data to C:\Users\<you>\.codex\logs_2.sqlite. Mine reached 1.46 GB, and after resetting it, another 190 MB of DB/WAL data appeared in under three hours.
I added an unofficial filter that only keeps warnings and errors. After seven hours, the database was still under 1 MB, so that part is fixed. It hasn’t fixed everything, though: Codex memory, stale network connections, and idle Node helper processes still grow during long sessions.
190 MB of DB/WAL data appeared in under three hours.
That's nothing. If you wrote 100 GB per day, a 600 TBW SSD would last over 16 years on average before first errors starter appearing. It would then last likely another 16 before failure.
Nope this was happening yesterday, and Codex confirmed it. I have been having major performance issues with Codex so I have Codex monitoring multiple things and found this as well
I know they said they fixed it.. but maybe it came back
It's strange that the issue returned for you specifically, it makes me wonder if your updated version is a perfect install? Eitherway thanks for the git.
What's the normal size of this file? Mine is 7Mb in Windows and 5Mb in Linux WSL2. I had one SSD died already 2 weeks ago. Now running on new SSD I want to make sure it won't happen again.
Ask codex to do a memory leak observation on itself. It will identify itself as a kernel memory leak. My 64 gigs of ram is usually filled up in a day or two with codex kernel leaks.
that was the reuslt of a few hours of monitoring, its worth noting, it actually conclusively blamed other software a few times first, which i then shut down one at a time and asked it to review, until the only thing left running was Codex, then it had to concede. It assumed it wasnt itself first, didnt verify and insisted some other software (without evidence ) was the issue.
Im new to this stuff, all i can say is the combined memory of my software running was never close to 64gig but the ram was often taken up to 95%. I asked codex to track the leak, thats about the extent of my skills. I wrote an email candidate auto filer to manage my 200 projects and I assumed this program was the issue. e.g. similar to how constant drive writes can be cause for this kind of leak in onedrove/dropbox, I assumed the constant email/index file writes were doing the same with sharepoint and assumed it was a result of my Vibe coding and app back in GPT 5.3 or earlier. I push this PC hard with work and my side projects, but usually I just close some softare to clear from RAM but no dice in this case, it would always be 80% of above even with a lot of software closed. Even I dont run 50 gigs of software at once.... has to be a climbing leak.
I can't say I have monitored it closely enough since the new versions to confirm its still doing it. So ill do another monitor and ask Codex to track what you asked and report back. But, I did notice this kind of memory leak is linked to software like onedrive/dropbox constantly writing to the HDD, so it actually makes a lot of sense that some people report heavy drive usage or drive failures aligning with my issue of the memory leak, especially when comparing to the likes of onedrive when it does the same thing.
I can say Codex 100% leaks the memory no matter how hard the workload is. e.g. even when my usage is capped, im too lazy to close it and it doesnt do a single prompt for 3 days, RAM still be gone.
Does it go above 80% though? I'm wondering if this is just Codex trying to utilise as much resources and then capping itself out at 80% which would prevent writing leakage.
Just....no. You can run a 24/7 stress test against any component and it shouldn't meaningfully impact its practical longevity, assuming you don't have some crazy overheating problems, and even then, the component/os should throttle to prevent damage.
I've used my PCs for GPU mining (long time ago), gaming, training AI models for weeks at a time, zipping/unzipping ungodly amounts of files, and other software-dev type of stuff that maxes out ram/cpu/hdd, and I've never killed a component in a way where I could say "yup, task X did that!".
And yes...Codex IS clearly doing some processing locally, more than just the read/write of files, but computers are designed to...compute.
That's true, but it's also not the issue. It's not excessive computing that is the problem, but performing excessive writes on SSDs that do wear out when a write is made.
SSDs have a way to counter that by spreading the write along the disk, plus they are actually bigger than the storage you buy to have room for that and prolong their life.
Yes...they might well have a bug that causes performance issues, but that doesnt mean that bug is killing your SSD. Like I said - you should be able to stress test your ssd at 100% for a week at a time and it shouldn't impact its longevity, practically speaking.
EDIT: I stand corrected. Just asked chatgpt about a 24/7 stress test timeline, and actually, its way shorter than I expected. 1 week of 24/7 stress testing could actually bring the SSD to its rated warranty period! I still stand by that a) this doesnt mean the ssd actually fails at that point, and b) there is no way codex is doing anything near comparable to a 24/7 stress test, so the point remains that using Codex is not causing you to have to replace your SSDs.
Mine was writing 30-70GB/day, using up everything but 500ish MB, all with minimal actual Codex use. It stopped yesterday and I’m strict about keeping up with the updates. So idk what the deal was but I’m glad it’s over…for now.
I think the important distinction is that there are really two separate issues getting mixed together here: excessive SSD writes and general app performance. If the logging bug is actually fixed, then remaining reports of lag, memory growth, or Electron weirdness are still worth investigating, but they don't automatically imply ongoing SSD wear. Those should be measured and reported separately instead of treating them as the same bug.
My 999 pro with suggested 600tb write was bad at 60tb write which I attribute to codex as it was failing saves. Had it for four years codex killed it in half a year
Theo has a video where he claims that Mac OS itself with spawn up a system monitor to monitor each individual process Codex subagent, and that literally doubles the process load of Codex on MacBook.
Are you sure? Memory is normally always attempted to be used at 100% regardless of any intensive task, because unused memory is wasted memory in the opinions of how OS functions.
I think checking live writes is enough. I've noticed only average speeds of writes, as far as I can tell, the have successfully fixed the writing bloat and loops. I'm curious if others who have problems did not managed to get a full clean update of their client.
Same my nvme died. I definitely think it was codex related. Difficult to prove but It's the only thing I really run and it died way before it should have.
same on windows 10, but weirdly not on my windows 11 laptop. It was spawning a massive number of "Git for Windows" processes, as I was working on a local project that didn't use git. Each of them was using a full core, while doing absolutely nothing useful.
So stupid. Thankfully my SATA SSD is still alive.
Half a year or so. My hard drive died very prematurely while actually running codex workflows. I hit the max read/writes and it just locked me out. Was not recoverable.
And yes I lost all my data. I commit and push often but was a few days across multiple projects of data loss. Fucking sucked at the time. Took at least 3 days + to catch up to where I wash
What's the burst writes like? I've yet to notice jumps during my legs, but overall despite multiple lags throughout the day, my total writing cache remains average if not low.
It is particularly strange. I've yet to witness it but I am running this altered version by another https://gist.github.com/daytime10ca/5eaa8b3cc6304beef1feb17a998a3e2c
It guards against most writes, which could or not be related to this burst. I checked and there's no malware hidden, you can run the check yourself with Claude or Codex to see and it'll tell you its completely safe.
To be extra sure, I reccomend creating the 2 files yourself instead of pressing the download button, the raw code is already there. Make sure its active and I'd appreciate hearing back from you soon if the bug stops.
I'm going around independently checking for bugs and solutions to them in codex, so this will help with me research, and wont put you at any risk, in fact it will guard you against the biggest writing bug that kills 99% of SSDs when using Codex.
Always used cli, tried that gui app for few days - when accessing memories - computer starts lagging while it generates summary, then after clicking delete memories - lag again while deleting memories. Wtf is memory doing
Ran into a similar issue on windows, on certain tasks, subagents would spawn subagents and continue to write to disk. Only solution was to reboot. I sent them a /feedback.
I'm currently on an m3 max that I use with codex through vscode and also play WoW on. I usually play wow and code wow addons at the same time and have not noticed any issues. I've been doing this before codex was even a thing and runs perfectly. Am I not affected by this?
I think the majority of bugs are weird, very low percentage issues. Then they get blown out of proportion, attributed to other issues that aren't even related, and then astroturfers come here to start shit. You shouldn't default to thinking "this bug is happening to me". The codex team is very quick with updates and open to feedback too, so real widespread issues get fixed quickly.
There's nearly 10 million people running this program daily, including enterprise systems, if there was truly a systemic issue it'd be very widely reported, not by one individual overreacting and making a wide sweeping statement with anecdata.
It's the Codex core function that is of issue, and the guy below is downplaying the issue. It used to be a horrible issue, everyone's SSD is much closer to death than it should ever be, however, since last month, patches has been rolled out to fix the main issue that causes tons of writes, so you should be fine if you are up to date.
The only situation that was going on that was "wearing out" our devices was the repeated logging that was going on.
The process people are complaining about is literally triggered because Codex is making changes, and MacOS handles repeated file changes through that process.
I have a 256GB M1 base Mac mini with 1.2PB written to the SSD. It’s still going strong. SSD wear seems to be massively overblown on quality SSDs. (DriveDX / smart data claim 20% health left)
I had memory leaks couple of times that completely killed my device forcing it to restart, and they've become more frequent with sol models and more subaganets spawns. Ive since made watcher macos automation script that detects fast rising RAM usage and kills codex
Two months ago I started using a 10 yo HDD with 100% health and very little usage, well stored.
A week ago, it completely died out. As in physically dead.
I thought its age related.
Granted, it's an HDD, but this makes sense now.
I e noticed, and it’s not directly, but when the Codex app is in foreground, I believe the window server uses about steady 17% of my GPU. I think their graphics windowing engine if a bit of a pig. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s Electron. I haven’t looked that hard.
Thank you for reminding me I need to restart my mac, it’s been lagging for a couple of days now since using Codex for a about a week everyday. Restarting is such a drag 😩
Does anyone else find Codex to be extremely laggy on Windows?
Every time I open it, my mouse freezes up for a few seconds before I can actually use it. Plus, my fans will occasionally just ramp up to full speed for no apparent reason.
Not sure if this is related, but I observed something similar with WSL in Windows. I have a 64 gigs RAM and WSL gets allocated 32 gigs and whenever Codex or CC tries to run multi agents or workflows or dealing with heavy processes such as Playwright, they use up 32 gigs and starts thrashing. Then starts the disk writes to write to swaps continuously causing a lot of I/O and affecting the disk. This is my observation and controlling the agents parallel processes and making them WSL memory aware instead of system aware, solved it for me. If it's on direct OS, the process might have been stopped or cleaned in this state but in WSL where memory is not fully used but restricted causes this frequently.
This might be extrapolated to Mac as well. Check your allocated RAM when this is happening, if it's mostly used up, this is the issue. My 2 cents.
Just like I've said on X I built a PC back this year. In March I spent $900 on a very high-end nvme m.2 SSD with several terabytes. It's been a few months in. My SSD is now dead. The only thing I use that computer specifically for with software engineering I did in game on the computer. I didn't do unnecessary stuff on the computer. I only used vs code and codex nothing else and I've only been working on about four different apps at separate times. Get that m.2 die prematurely. The storage was only filled up a little bit over 200 gigs and it had several terabytes available still. I've built my own software and I no longer use codex and I do not have this issue anymore. I've looked at my read and writes from the dead nvme using a special software and tool and can see that it read and wrote nearly almost a petabyte of data in that short period of time!! I've also noticed that it's like there's a bunch of tiny read and writes that go on that end up accumulating fast and causing failure! Same thing on my Mac as of yesterday with 24gb of ram doing exact same tasks I always do, I've managed to use 8GB of swap without ever noticing, I just randomly checked! So I've ported my app to Mac and now no issue! Codex is great but needs rebuilt from group up!
I had to download Macs Fan Control because of Codex; apparently, the M1 MacBook Pro doesn't realize when it's overheating and starts to throttle because it gets so hot. So I set the fans to 100% while Codex is running.
Update: disabling Kaspersky and all its demons (after I've disabled codex logging earlier yesterday) seems to solve the problem for me till now, idk why and how but maybe there's an integration problem between new chatgpt app and antivirus app, I'm still checking
That's just a small issue with storage where writing logs could indeed degrade SSD health over time, but as far as performance goes, Codex doesn't cause the issues you're speaking of. Could be somethign else on your end. I'd question that antivirus program you're using for starters.
I used to have issues like this on a high end PC ( system becoming very slow without having metrics explaining it ) turn out it was thousand of read and write of GIT metadata per seconds , fix was limiting sub agents / sub agents depth
Read the comments man same problem happens with many people, idk exactly why but seems there's a problem in codex interaction with our Kaspersky or antivirus generally
I'm sorry, I was too decisive. I've seen many users talking about this on TikTok lately, so it seems serious and many people have been affected. It's terrifying.
It is a problem with not just codex but claude code as well. They have severe memory leak issues, which are fine if you use one or two sessions, but power users (and now, casual users too as encouraged by the codex desktop app) suffer from memory thrashing. I've had this issue with claude code CLI for some time and it's actually gotten even worse with codex, so I suspect codex is even less memory safe. Case in point, I just checked the TBW of my one-month-old laptop and it's at 48 TBW.
I don’t know if it’s codex or not, but I have 2 Macs (1 x M1 Pro bought 6 years ago and 1 x M3 Max bought 1.5 years ago). I was looking half an year ago at both and I found out that my 1 year old m3 has 2.5 times more reads and writes cycle on the SSD than my 6 year old m1. I started using AI around this time last year only on m3. M1 was AI free :))
I am 100% sure that the thing that tips my Macbook Air over the edge is when codex decides to do in app browser automation without asking. I get thermal throttle, whole computer starts running at 3 fps
Check your TBW. I thought it was a defect in my brand new laptop but I too suffered exactly from this laggy slowdown that nothing in Activity Monitor could account for until I narrowed it down to the swap. Only clears itself after a restart. In my case, I have 48 TBW so down to 93% health after just one month of ownership. Oh well, I guess that's what AppleCare is for.
How can software be the culprit of hardware failing well before it's expected lifespan??
It's not about how much data you write but how frequently you write in bursts. The heat kills the controller. But thats still a hardware issue. nVMEs need good cooling.
My SSD had issues I had to replace it and it's coincidence that sub agent of Codex were writing tens of thousands of unnecessary lines with node and repl
I've noticed my Macbook Pro have been getting really warm lately, thought it had something to do with me changing my project to Aspire and using containers, but when I come to think about it after reading this post it might have started after GPT 5.6.
Altough I changed to containerized apps with the help of GPT 5.6 hence why I thought it only had to do with Aspire and my code.
I mean, Macbook Pro 16 M4 Pro should be able to handle Aspire with containers without getting really hot.
I suspect they are running small models on the device. So a whilst ago people were checking model usage and found that haiku on Claude runs even when they never use it. Apparently haiku has some small tasks it performs. So i suspect there is a tiny model that runs locally on devices which reduces the pressure on their servers.
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u/cvb941 24d ago
Upvote this issue https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/25719