VS Code extension high CPU in window processes when switching to Codex chat list; fixed by downgrading to 0.4.79
Open 💬 8 comments Opened Apr 11, 2026 by neverlva
What version of the IDE extension are you using?
26.409.20454
What subscription do you have?
Plus
Which IDE are you using?
VS Code
What platform is your computer?
Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64 (Windows 11)
What issue are you seeing?
When I switch to a Codex child window that shows the list of all chats, CPU usage becomes very high. In VS Code Process Explorer, two processes named "window" consume a lot of CPU.
What steps can reproduce the bug?
Open VS Code
Open the Codex extension
Open/switch to the Codex child window with the list of chats
Observe CPU spike
What is the expected behavior?
Switching to the Codex chat-list window should not cause high CPU usage.
Additional information
Reproduces in a clean VS Code profile using separate user-data-dir and extensions-dir
Reproduces with --disable-gpu
No repeated errors were visible in the standard developer console
Closing the Codex window alone did not immediately stop the issue
Downgrading the extension to 0.4.79 made the problem disappear
8 Comments
I’ve been experiencing this as well. It’s been happening for at least a few weeks now—basically since I started using Codex. The high CPU usage seems to be a persistent bug.
And I'm on macOS
same problem
Same problem on macOS
Same problem on MacOS
This can be reliably reproduced. Whenever the following is present on the page:
<img width="556" height="154" alt="Image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/5260a6a3-8d5e-41cc-89b7-a12f93bcd624" />
i.e., whenever you open a conversation that contains any code changes, the extension starts to consume high CPU.
Maybe I’m being a bit pessimistic—and I don’t want to sound that way—but I’ve looked through the issues in this entire repo, and it seems like very few bugs are actually being fixed. Most are closed as duplicates, and they remain duplicates because the underlying issues aren’t being addressed. Honestly, I don’t see much active bug-fixing happening at all.
Instead of all the marketing rhetoric, it would be great if companies like OpenAI or Anthropic could show how they use their "world-changing" AI to actually fix the obvious bugs in their own tools.
Fix for macOS https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/16231#issuecomment-4205506808
@adrielmsantos @Smallfu666
@GoXLd The script does fix the problem. Thank you.