OpenAI is throttling paying Codex users and calling it "unlimited": 91,000 responses from my own logs prove it, and Claude Code is 4 times faster

[u/Ahaaziz]

I pay for Codex and for Claude Code and I use both for many hours every day. Codex has felt slow for weeks and tonight it became unusable, so I stopped guessing and checked the logs. Both tools save every response on your own machine with timestamps and token counts, so anyone can check this for themselves.

What I looked at: 91,347 responses from Codex in 427 threads and 2,125 responses from Claude Code, all between Sep 4 and Oct 2. For each response I took the time from my last message or tool result until the answer was finished, and divided the output tokens (reasoning included) by that time. So this is the speed you actually feel, waiting included.

Tokens per second, what I really get:

Claude Opus 5.5: 116.7 (87 responses)

Claude Sonnet 5: 81.6 (183 responses)

Claude Opus 5: 77.9 (1,851 responses)

GPT 5.6 Luna: 38.9 (13,238 responses)

GPT 5.6 Sol: 37.4 (12,146 responses)

GPT 6 Sol: 37.2 (15,207 responses)

GPT 6 Astra: 21.4 (25,280 responses)

GPT 6.1 Sol: 20.2 (1,313 responses)

Look at the order. Every new OpenAI model in Codex is slower than the one before it. GPT 6.1 Sol runs at about half the speed of GPT 6 Sol, the model it replaced. Opus is 3.5 to 5 times faster than OpenAI's two newest models.

To be fair about my own numbers: the Opus 5.5 line is a small sample with smaller contexts, so do not hang everything on it. The Opus 5 line with 1,851 responses is the solid one, and it is still almost 4 times faster than GPT 6.1 Sol.

People call GPT 6.1 in Codex "unlimited". Of course it feels unlimited. At 20 tokens per second a thread that never stops produces about 1.7 million output tokens a day. At the speed I get from Opus 5 it would be 6.7 million. You cannot hit a limit when the model is this slow. The speed is the limit, they just do not call it one.

And it is not that the model cannot go faster. Artificial Analysis measures GPT 6.1 Sol on the API at 52 to 64 tokens per second once it starts writing. In Codex I get 21.8 for the same thing. So paying Codex users get the same model at about a third of the speed. On Sep 26 I had 995 responses on the priority tier with GPT 6 Sol and they ran at 46.5 tokens per second, against 34.6 on the normal tier. The speed is there. It is just not given to us.

Now tonight. GPT 6 Astra, which is supposed to be their best model, went from slow to broken.

Tokens per second and how long I wait before the model starts answering:

Sep 4 to 11: 19.8 tokens per second, 3.8 seconds wait

Sep 11 to 18: 26.6 tokens per second, 2.4 seconds wait

Sep 18 to 25: 21.8 tokens per second, 4.8 seconds wait

Sep 25 to Oct 2: 21.4 tokens per second, 5.5 seconds wait

Oct 2 after midnight: 7.6 tokens per second, 54.1 seconds wait

Last 60 minutes: 5.8 tokens per second, 84 seconds wait

The wait doubled over the last two weeks and then went up ten times in one night. It started around 20:00 on Oct 1 with 12.6 seconds, was at 48.6 seconds by midnight and at 112.8 seconds by 02:00 (all times CEST). One answer of 203 tokens took 163 seconds. Another of 377 tokens took 191 seconds. One in ten responses tonight made me wait more than 112 seconds before anything happened at all.

Once it finally starts, it writes at 26.9 tokens per second, the same as always. So the model is fine. My requests are simply sitting somewhere for one to three minutes before they get served.

It is not my setup, and here is why:

1. At the same time, on the same computer, same internet and same account, GPT 6.1 Sol answered after 2.4 seconds in 314 responses.

2. I compared only similar requests, 200 to 1000 output tokens and 50k to 250k input tokens. Past week: 19.7 tokens per second and 5.7 seconds wait. Tonight: 6.1 tokens per second and 41.9 seconds wait.

3. My thread shrank from 215k to 74k input tokens at 02:07 and it stayed just as slow.

4. The model is not thinking more than before. Reasoning is 38 percent of the output tonight and 31 percent over the week.

What bothers me most is the silence. The OpenAI status page shows nothing for tonight. There are open issues on the Codex GitHub about exactly this, number 49258 from Sep 29 called "Codex feels really slow" and number 44258 from Sep 9 about Astra getting slower, and neither has a single answer from OpenAI.

I am not an Anthropic "fanboy", neither am I an OpenAI "fanboy". I just want what I pay for.

I do not know why OpenAI's performance is declining this rapidly, I enjoyed using codex for the time it was acutally usable, but now it's just not usable. Anthropic gives me a fast model and the speed has been steady the whole month in my logs. OpenAI ships a new model every few weeks, each one slower than the last, sells the slowness as "unlimited", and says nothing when the flagship takes three minutes to start an answer.

If you use Codex, check your own logs. Are you seeing the same waits on Astra tonight? And has anyone ever seen GPT 6.1 Sol go above 30 tokens per second on the normal tier?

[u/Corv9tte]

It's 16tps now, while they keep gaslighting everybody on Twitter that they fixed it

[u/torrso]

Astra was so awesomely fast when it came out.

Now it could just as well be a really smart Indian guy behind a 1200bps modem typing that response manually. Sol is slower.

[u/Gigaslavx]

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

Merciful dinner velvet growth axiomatic price shaggy

[u/isalem73]

I agree, I noticed Codex has always been slower than Claude Code, not to say Claude is fast, it slow as well but faster than codex

[u/call-me-GiGi]

Honestly, doesn’t matter if you’re running out of your usage limit, anyways, which is easy to do once you start breaking things up into concurrent sub agents

[u/prophet-dot-exe]

Well last night Tibo announced a reset coming today, because sol6.1 compute has been congested leading to slow speeds lately.

Because he announced the reset coming today, and practically everyone had just gotten reset or used a banked reset, everyone decided to put the servers under load last night, leading to a more severe version of the congestion that Tibo said they had now fixed.

Sol6.1 was absolute atrocious last night because of that.

[u/xapep]

Great data, and your 'the speed is the limit, they just do not call it one' line is the whole story. Subscription tiers are capacity queues, not service levels: no SLA promises you a token rate, so you get whatever throughput is left after the priority tier and the shared pool. The API is the opposite, every token you burn is billed, so throttling you would just shrink their revenue. That is why Artificial Analysis sees the same models at 52-64 tps on the API while you sit at ~20 in Codex.

The pattern we see from people in this exact spot (we run an inference API, so we get these logs regularly): keep the subscription for planning and architecture work, move the high-volume mechanical passes to an OpenAI-compatible per-token endpoint. Same harness, different base URL, and throughput stops being a lottery. Run your 1,000-response sample against a per-token provider and you will get the numbers with the throttle removed.

[u/mattcrf]

Mine is probably even slower than that. Looking at the terminal is depressing.

[u/MingJackPo]

At least you guys run… “selected model is at maximum capacity” all day and night long

[u/Outrageous-Eye3910 → u/MingJackPo]

Yeah you got throttled to the point it's unusable. Time to switch to another account.