/side, /fork, backtrack in very long sessions are linearly-in-jsonl slow

Resolved 💬 2 comments Opened Apr 24, 2026 by qdbp Closed Apr 24, 2026

What version of Codex CLI is running?

0.124

What subscription do you have?

pro

Which model were you using?

gpt-5.5

What platform is your computer?

Linux 6.19.11-arch1-1 x86_64 unknown

What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?

alacritty 0.17.0 (94e7c887)

What issue are you seeing?

I hate resetting my sessions so I'm at about 15 billion tokens now.

/fork and /side now take about ~30 seconds. I assume some linear scan of the jsonl is happening, but this file is 1.5 GiB now and most of it is useless. Ctrl+L clears do not help with this.

There should perhaps be lookback limits to any operation that would otherwise scan the whole jsonl.

jsonl trimming also seems sensible. The reason I keep indefinite sessions is because a lot of implicit understanding gets baked deep into the context by your (amazing, I must add) compaction, and a cold reset always hurts -- but I don't care about preserving the infinite jsonl (or, in a perfect world, the truncated bit would be zstd+logrotated). Some sort of (auto) /trim would do wonders here.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Have a very long session (3B+ to be noticeable) and do anything like /side, /fork or esc-esc rewind.

What is the expected behavior?

These operations are snappy.

Additional information

019db0a9-e8d4-70f1-9dd4-312efe80bcde

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