ChatGPT Desktop / Codex app is using excessive memory, reaching 68 GB on a 36 GB MacBook

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened Jul 9, 2026 by mattyatea Closed Jul 9, 2026

💡 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)?

Version 26.707.30751

What subscription do you have?

ChatGPT Pro x20

What platform is your computer?

Darwin 25.5.0 arm64 arm

What issue are you seeing?

The latest ChatGPT Desktop / Codex app appears to be using an excessive amount of memory.

My MacBook has 36 GB of RAM, but the app attempted to use around 68 GB of memory. This caused very high memory pressure and made the system feel unstable.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

Feedback ID: 019f47f8-a260-7090-a517-be9422f1439b

What is the expected behavior?

_No response_

Additional information

Feedback ID: 019f47f8-a260-7090-a517-be9422f1439b

View original on GitHub ↗

3 Comments

github-actions[bot] contributor · 1 month ago

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

#31793
#31743

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mattyatea · 1 month ago

I’m not sure, but this might be related to using many SubAgents.

I don’t have a confirmed reproduction yet, but from what I remember, the excessive memory usage seemed to happen while I was using multiple SubAgents / agent tasks in the Codex app.

mattyatea · 1 month ago

Update: I found the likely cause, so I’m going to close this issue.

Embarrassingly, this was probably caused by my own local Codex configuration. I had the following in my .codex/config.toml:

[agents]
max_threads = 1000

[features.multi_agent_v2]
enabled = false
max_concurrent_threads_per_session = 1000

So the excessive memory usage was likely caused by allowing Codex to use an unusually large number of agent threads, rather than by normal/default app behavior.

Sorry for the noise, and thank you!