Codex Desktop on Windows is an unoptimized mess — massive memory consumption, fans at full blast with zero workload

What version of the Codex App are you using?

26.721.4979.0 (Microsoft Store)

What subscription do you have?

Pro

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11 (x64, laptop — i7, 16GB RAM, dedicated GPU)

What issue are you seeing?

The Codex desktop app on Windows is a disaster from a performance standpoint. The moment I launch it — before I type a single prompt, before it does anything — my laptop fans instantly ramp up to full speed. Just sitting there. Idling. Doing nothing.

Memory consumption is completely unacceptable. This is a chat client, not a game engine. It routinely eats over 1GB of RAM while idle. Why? On macOS, the same Codex app runs smoothly and does not demolish system resources. The Windows build feels like an afterthought — a poorly optimized Electron wrapper that nobody bothered to profile.

The gap between the Mac and Windows experience is night and day. I use Codex on both platforms. Mac: smooth, quiet, reasonable resource usage. Windows: sluggish, memory-hungry, thermally aggressive. These are not minor hiccups — this is a fundamentally unoptimized build.

It is genuinely embarrassing that a company with OpenAI's resources ships a desktop app in this state.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Open Codex Desktop on Windows 11
2. Do absolutely nothing — no prompt, no project loaded
3. Open Task Manager
4. Watch the memory climb past 1GB while CPU spikes
5. Listen to the fans spin up like the machine is compiling a kernel
6. That is all. It happens every single time.

What is the expected behavior?

A desktop chat app should not consume more system resources than a full IDE. It should sit quietly in the background when idle, not thermally throttle the machine.

Additional information

I have Codex installed on both macOS and Windows 11 machines, same Pro subscription. The difference is stark and reproducible. The macOS build is polished and performant. The Windows build is the worst-performing desktop application I use — worse than any IDE, worse than Docker Desktop, worse than Chrome with 50 tabs.

If the development team primarily uses Macs, that would explain everything. But someone needs to actually open the Windows build on real, mid-range Windows hardware and see what users are dealing with. This is not a niche bug — it is a systemic quality gap that makes the app borderline unusable for Windows users.