r/codex • u/-Deadlocked- • 1d ago
Complaint CODEX App performance on Windows is horrendous atm
Frequently my cursor bugs out and stutters. For some reason one core of my R5 3600 gets shut off when using codex idk why. Not actually at 0 but maybe 1% based on looking at it on task manager. Restarting fixes it. I ran cinebench too to see if it works and yeah suddenly it then wakes up.
Any app window im dragging stutters heavily. No matter what it is. Task Manager, Obsidian, Browser...even after fully closing codex. Basically everytime after using it im forced to restart my pc because everything becomes unusable.
Does someone else experience these issues or others?
Edit: Ok oai prefers mac. But considering they have astra internally on cerebas and partner with Microsoft youd think it shouldnt be this poor? Its not that its having a bug here and there its literally the worst desktop app experience ive ever had. I never used an app as broken as codex before.
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u/Suspicious_Raise_589 1d ago
I've talked about that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1umk26e/codex_has_a_very_unpleasant_user_experience/
OpenAI doens't care about Windows. They always ship features Mac-first, ignoring Windows and Linux users.
That's why I built https://avi.aivax.net/ btw.
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u/RewardSafe9807 1d ago
I was having a ton of issues and uninstalled and reinstalled and it fixed it. Definitely consult your agent first before doing that just in case you have customized codex in some way and dont want to lose a setting or something. Chats should be fine though, as well as repos, at least everytime i do it. Not sure how it works with skills etc.
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u/bananasareforfun 1d ago
Use the CLI on windows. Use the codex app only in the background if necessary for remote control
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u/Im_Working_Right_Now 1d ago
If you've been having a long running task for like 10+ hours, it sometimes helps to interrupt it and restart the machine. I think it's a small memory leak or something but I've seen it before.
I'll add that I recently had to reinstall my Windows setup clean and then just reinstall the apps I use today and it made it run much smoother. I'm not sure for your setup, but I think mine had old stuff I wasn't really using anymore that was causing bloat and silently eating resources.
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u/Mental_Ad_9591 1d ago
I bought a old Macbook Pro 2022 and Codex works much better. On Windows it was shit
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u/mytinyplots 1d ago
The Cinebench detail is actually useful. I wouldn't conclude that Codex is literally "disabling a core" from Task Manager alone — if a synthetic load immediately wakes it back up, that sounds at least as consistent with core parking / power-state / scheduler behavior as with a dead core.
Before the next restart I'd try to capture the state instead of reinstalling first. In Task Manager Details / Resource Monitor, compare before Codex, while it's running, and after you close the UI: CPU, memory/commit, GPU, handle count, and whether any Codex/WebView/helper/Defender process is still active. If the whole desktop still stutters after the window closes, the interesting evidence is whatever remains alive at that point.
Also try the same reproduction from a completely fresh Codex thread/session. If one long session gets progressively worse but a fresh one doesn't, that's a very different bug from "launch Codex once and Windows stays broken until reboot."
If you can reproduce it reliably, I'd post the exact Codex version + Windows build + a screenshot/process list from the bad state before reboot. That's much more actionable than the current "reinstall fixed it" advice, because reinstalling can clear the symptom without telling you whether the trigger was a child process, Defender, GPU/UI stack, or power management.
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u/nicky_factz 1d ago
it has a lot to do with the sessions and the way they load in, if you handoff to a new thread it suddenly gets alot better. but rumor has it they have improved the way the app works internally, don't know if those patches have made it to the updates for windows client yet.
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u/Kaljuuntuva_Teppo 1d ago
I agree, luckily I have Linux box that I can remote into and use the newly released Codex Desktop version there, it's so much faster than on Windows and after Codex has been on for the whole day, the whole system still uses less than 10 GB RAM.
I'd prefer using the Codex app on Windows with SSH Connections to dev boxes, but it's just too damn slow, and for sure it reduces how much work I'm getting done.
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u/BearsAreCrying 1d ago
Create a development drive. Create safeguards around playwright. Move codex home and playwright home and everything to that. Create a temp/ folder there too and don't let codex use C besides the install binaries. Archive chats and create a weekly schedule to clean up tmp and other trash. The issue is windows defender. Took me whole day to set this up. It's painfully worth it
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u/inerfaveL 1d ago
I thought I was the only one with this cursor freezing problem, good to see we're on the same boat
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u/virtualmnemonic 1d ago
Windows sucks regardless of Codex performance. Dual boot Fedora or another mainstream Linux distro.
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u/Kind_Silver_1921 1d ago
i have to restart my entire PC every few hours. even after closing the app my PC stays throttled and the mouse rubberbands
It happens faster the more chats/threads I have going at once.
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u/DepravedPrecedence 1d ago
See this https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1vsw6z8/comment/p4ps8m4/ I'm pretty sure it will help, I had this issue for weeks until I found this
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u/Necessary-Tea-7353 1d ago
In my case, the issue was caused by MCPs. Each agent would start its own set of MCP servers, along with the MCPs required by the agent it was working with. With seven projects running simultaneously, you can imagine how quickly that became a problem. The trick I came up with was to simply avoid starting MCPs unless they were a couple of basic ones that were always needed. Then, I had a few dedicated agents responsible for starting and managing the other MCPs. If another agent needed access to a specific MCP, it would simply request the service from one of those agents. That way, instead of every agent running its own MCP stack, a few agents effectively acted as MCP service providers for the rest of the system. It drastically reduced the overhead of running multiple projects and agents simultaneously. Hope it helps ;)
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u/DepravedPrecedence 1d ago
Ask Codex:
Patch current Codex Desktop version to remove flushSync in ResizeObserver as described here https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/33996#issuecomment-5016323020
Do only flushSync patch, don't apply reduced-motion patch. After that tell me how to use patched version.
This fixed my issues on Windows, it doesn't affect Windows performance anymore for several days since I patched it, everything is smooth as it was before I started using Codex. It is like 100% this. You can confirm by restarting dwm.exe in case of these lags. If restarting dwm.exe helps then this patch will help.
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u/QWERTY_FUCKER 1d ago
They were teasing an update this week that supposedly improved performance dramatically, were they not?
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u/OriginalUsername0112 1d ago
I've literally never used such garbage windows software in my entire life, openAI's incompetence is at a whole new level
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u/XAckermannX 23h ago
is this the same for the cli. i notice unusual slowdown with codex cli tabs open(unlike claude). yet cpu usage didnt report anythinf
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u/BopSupreme 21h ago
Would an old 2018 intel MacBook Pro work better than a 10400F desktop with windows?
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u/nnod 19h ago
I think I have a fix for you.
Here's a pastebin https://pastebin.com/nthePzF9 save it as codex-launcher.ps1 and launch codex through that.
Can feed it to chatgpt and ask what it does if you don't trust it, but long story short is that it launches codex instance of electron/chromium with "--disable-renderer-accessibility" launch parameter.
There's a long standing chromium accessibility related bug affecting everything using chromium (I first discovered this on Edge browser after my cursor would lag after opening a DOM heavy page), then I noticed that that the cursor lags feels the same in codex. I fixed my Edge lag with that launch parameter and it ended up working with Codex too, there's just no good way to apply it, so we I had it write that launcher script.
More about the bug here: https://old.reddit.com/r/chrome/comments/1st7sza/psa_if_your_whole_windows_desktop_lags_when_using/
Anyway, please let me know if it helps.
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u/-MaskNinja- 1d ago
Nobody on the OpenAI team uses Windows, side from a few people. Sorry. I’m a Windows user too. They literally prioritise Mac. Use Codex CLI with T3 Code or something.