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

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

• #27564
• #26507

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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.

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.

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.

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_Generated with ax._

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

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.

really annoying regression :(

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

This appears to have been solved with the latest update.

Not solved in 26.707.31428 for me.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

yea, this still happening.

Having the same problem, it just gets worse every day... :(

Additional symptom clarification from a Windows Codex Desktop user:

• On launch, moving the physical mouse sometimes produces no visible cursor movement for a short period.
• The user then stops moving the mouse, and after a delay the cursor suddenly responds/catches up.
• The problem is transient and goes away after Codex has been open for a while.
• This feels like input latency/freezing or queued pointer events rather than purely visual cursor jitter.

This seems particularly consistent with the brief mouse/input freezes described in this issue.

On Windows, the latest Codex update caused frequent split-second system-wide mouse and shell freezes while Codex was open.

We first suspected repeated Conversation state not found errors and stale session state. A cleanup attempt broke the app, so we rolled everything back. After rollback, the same errors and old state were restored—but the lag was gone. The meaningful change was that the rollback forced a genuine shutdown of every Codex/ChatGPT process and a fresh restart. The main process working set fell from about 1.36 GB to 334 MB.

What others should try:

1. Fully quit Codex.
2. In Task Manager, confirm every ChatGPT.exe process has exited. Closing the window alone may leave hidden processes running.
3. Reopen Codex.

No sessions or state files need to be deleted. This suggests accumulated Electron process/renderer memory or cache state; the exact internal cause is not yet proven.

Affected package: OpenAI.Codex_26.810.6296.0_x64__2p2nqsd0c76g0.

That does not fix the problem this issue covers, which happens consistently in a fresh start.

Just abandoned Codex for lack of Windows support and started working on AVI btw https://github.com/aivaxlabs/avi

Yep, I use T3code instead.