Windows Desktop: brief mouse/input freezes after opening Codex with large sessions directory

Resolved 💬 16 comments Opened Jun 13, 2026 by Shoting-star Closed Jul 14, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (github-actions[bot], contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What happened?

After a recent Codex Desktop update, opening/running Codex on Windows causes intermittent short system input freezes. The mouse cursor and normal interaction occasionally pause for about 1-2 seconds, then recover. The pauses are short but frequent enough to noticeably affect normal use.

This seems similar to reports of Windows Desktop stutter/freezing and possible session-history scanning overhead.

Related issues/discussions I found while checking for similar reports:

#20214
#20864
#19923
#22376

Environment

App: Codex Desktop for Windows
Codex package version: 26.609.4994.0
Package: OpenAI.Codex_26.609.4994.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0
OS: Windows 10 Pro, 64-bit
OS build: 26200
Shell/context used for inspection: PowerShell
Timezone: Asia/Hong_Kong

Local observations

The issue occurs while Codex Desktop is open. A local inspection found a relatively large Codex sessions directory:

Sessions path: C:\Users\<user>\.codex\sessions
JSONL session files: 46
Total session JSONL size: 361.25 MB
Largest session file: 232.65 MB
Largest session file path pattern: sessions\2026\05\14\rollout-2026-05-14T21-41-15-...jsonl
Largest file last write time: 2026-05-18 03:45:26

I also checked for the WSL_DISTRO_NAME environment-variable issue mentioned in #22376. It was empty at User, Machine, and Process scope, so that does not appear to be the cause in this case.

Several Codex processes were present while the app was running; the largest observed working sets were roughly 418 MB, 347 MB, and 245 MB.

Expected behavior

Opening Codex Desktop should not cause global mouse/input freezes, even if local session history contains large JSONL files.

Actual behavior

With Codex Desktop open, mouse/input intermittently freezes for roughly 1-2 seconds.

Possible cause

Based on the local state and related reports, this may be related to Desktop scanning/parsing/rendering large files under ~/.codex/sessions, or otherwise doing synchronous work on the UI path when session history is large.

Privacy note

I am not attaching the session JSONL contents because they may contain private conversation/project data. The report only includes file counts, sizes, and path shape.

View original on GitHub ↗

16 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 1 month ago

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

#27564
#26507

Powered by Codex Action

Shoting-star · 1 month ago

Additional observation:

After Codex Desktop is opened, the stutter/freezing usually improves after waiting a few minutes. However, if Codex is fully exited and then opened again, the same issue returns and I need to wait a few minutes again before it becomes usable.

Older Codex Desktop versions did not have this startup-period mouse/input freezing behavior. Even though it eventually improves after a few minutes, that startup delay significantly affects normal use.

Shoting-star · 1 month ago

The mouse/input freezing also happens whenever I open a historical conversation/session from Codex Desktop. After selecting/opening a history item, the mouse frequently freezes for a few seconds and then recovers.

Necmttn · 29 days ago

Desktop startup should not synchronously hydrate large session directories on the UI path.

A small manifest can track session id, path, mtime, size, hash, title, and last timestamp. Startup reads the manifest first, schedules changed-file parsing off the renderer thread, and reports scan duration/file counts in diagnostics.

That would turn the freeze into an inspectable indexing backlog.

---

_Generated with ax._

btkh95 · 27 days ago

I am facing this issue as well. At first I went down the rabbit hole of removing my recently local installed rg.exe and nodejs. I figured out that rg was causing this issue. Post uninstalling I was still facing this issue and I realised codex has its one rg? and is causing massive lags and crashes.

I realised it's worse when I engage in a past project with extended history and long context. Was not having this issue the week before as well.

This should be an urgent matter to be addressed, as where it currently standa it makes VSCode with codex and Codex App virtually unusable

oc83126-lgtm · 27 days ago

Adding another Windows repro that looks very similar to this issue.

Environment:

Codex Desktop package: OpenAI.Codex 26.616.10790.0
OS: Windows build 26220
Install family: Microsoft Store / AppX desktop package

Symptom:

After launching Codex Desktop, the app window can become sluggish even when other heavy apps are not being actively used.
The noticeable symptoms are UI-level stutter: dragging the window, typing into the composer, and scrolling can lag.
This is not just slow model output or network delay; the desktop window interaction itself can feel choppy shortly after opening Codex.

Local observations:

~/.codex/sessions total size is about 3064 MB.
Largest rollout JSONL is about 738 MB.
Multiple other rollout JSONL files are over 100 MB.
Current active thread file is small, so the issue is not only caused by the active thread currently being huge.
Recent Windows event logs did not show a Codex Application Hang event.
Recent System event logs did not show NVIDIA/display driver errors.
A later idle sample did not show CPU, memory, or disk queue saturation, which makes this look like intermittent startup/history/UI processing stutter rather than the machine being generally overloaded.

Related log observation:

~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite is about 400 MB, with most of that space reported as SQLite free pages.
It still records some TRACE entries on 26.616.10790.0, but idle sampling after the update did not show continuous runaway disk writes.
So in this repro, the startup/window/input/scroll lag seems more strongly correlated with large local session history than with constant log growth.

Privacy note:

I am not attaching raw session JSONL files or raw logs because they may contain private conversation, project data, local paths, or tool output.

archasek · 19 days ago

really annoying regression :(

ryanbevins · 18 days ago

Also experiencing this, messages from Codex cause it to happen, alongside opening new conversations until they've been cached.

Specs:
AMD Ryzen 7950x
64gb DDR5 RAM
RTX 5080 GPU

ryanbevins · 9 days ago

This appears to have been solved with the latest update.

rodalpho · 9 days ago

Not solved in 26.707.31428 for me.

realcp1018 · 7 days ago

Still reproducible for me on Windows 10 Pro 10.0.19045 with Codex Desktop 26.707.62119.
The impact is severe: immediately after launching or restarting the app, and again whenever switching to or opening another conversation thread, the system-wide mouse cursor becomes nearly frozen or moves at an extremely low frame rate until the session content finishes loading and the UI completes rendering.

ryanbevins · 6 days ago

Still reproducible for me on Windows 10 Pro 10.0.19045 with Codex Desktop 26.707.62119. The impact is severe: immediately after launching or restarting the app, and again whenever switching to or opening another conversation thread, the system-wide mouse cursor becomes nearly frozen or moves at an extremely low frame rate until the session content finishes loading and the UI completes rendering.

Was occuring for me before recent updates but is now gone, may have something to do with Windows updates or driver updates considering mine disappeared.

rodalpho · 6 days ago

This is NOT fixed, I just opened codex then selected a long session and my mouse lagged like before.

This is on windows version 26.707.72221.

Sk-only · 4 days ago

Is there any good way to solve this? I have the exact same problem.

realcp1018 · 3 days ago

I think things are going really bad at the moment. Cursor is lagging even when tasks are running in the background.
I'm on the latest version, 26.715.21425.

tyc0on · 2 days ago

I am getting this too, isolated it to ChatGPT/codex app