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Codex Issues / #26371

Excessive Codex Usage Consumption During Deleted Chat Recovery Attempt

Open 💬 2 comments Opened Jun 4, 2026 by stkthreejp
💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Codex Desktop Version: 26.601.21317

What subscription do you have?

Workspace

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26220.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

Title: Excessive Codex Usage Consumption During Deleted Chat Recovery Attempt

Environment:

  • Codex Desktop Version: 26.601.21317
  • Model: GPT-5.5
  • Workspace Plan

Issue:
I asked Codex to help locate deleted chats/conversations. During this request, Codex consumed an extremely large amount of usage quota, including approximately 25% of my weekly allocation from a single task.

Expected Behavior:
The task should either:

  • report that deleted chats cannot be recovered, or
  • perform a bounded search and return results.

Actual Behavior:
Codex entered a lengthy investigative workflow involving repeated searches of local session stores, caches, rollout files, SQLite databases, and related artifacts. The task generated millions of tokens and consumed a disproportionate amount of quota.

Evidence:

  • Rollout/session log approximately 851 KB in size.
  • Usage metrics in the log show multi-million-token consumption.
  • Session files referenced in the log include .codex/sessions rollout files.
  • The issue occurred while attempting to locate deleted chats after a cache-clearing operation.

Please investigate whether this represents:

  • runaway agent behavior,
  • excessive internal tool recursion,
  • incorrect usage accounting,
  • or a regression in Codex Desktop 26.601.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Feedback ID: 019e9036-e443-71c1-8d65-46f44696ef2d

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

rollout-2026-06-04T05-36-15-019e91fd-8119-7380-aaa4-3af1ac0f4b35.zip

View original on GitHub ↗

2 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 2 months ago

Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.

  • #25051
  • #25910

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stkthreejp · 2 months ago

Additional Context

I first noticed the excessive usage consumption before the deleted-chat recovery effort.

On June 3, I observed that my usage limits were being depleted unusually quickly and disproportionately to the prompts I was submitting. The excessive quota consumption was already occurring at that time.

Because of that behavior, I later asked Codex to help investigate the issue and determine why my usage was being consumed so rapidly. During that investigation, Codex performed a cache-clearing operation on my local installation. Following that operation, local chat/session history appeared to be missing, which led to a separate effort on June 4 to locate or recover the missing conversations.

To be clear:

  1. The abnormal usage consumption was observed before any cache-clearing or recovery actions were taken.
  2. The deleted-chat recovery attempt was an effort to diagnose and recover data after the cache-clearing operation.
  3. The large usage spike associated with the recovery effort is concerning, but it does not explain the original excessive quota consumption that was already occurring beforehand.

My primary concern is understanding why usage limits were being depleted so aggressively prior to the cache-clearing operation, and whether the subsequent recovery workflow triggered additional runaway agent activity that further increased usage consumption.