Codex Desktop eats 59GB of Mac disk space with endless crash dumps
Codex is EATING my Mac's disk space
A GitHub issue reports that the Codex Desktop app on macOS keeps writing paired crash-dump files into its Crashpad pending folder without any limit. One user saw 4.9GB and 54,504 files in a single day; another hit 59GB and 738,864 files, still growing at about one report per second. The culprit appears to be browser_crashpad_handler crashing in a loop. Reinstalls and disabling the bundled browser didn't help; only making the folder read-only stopped the growth.
Both Claude and Codex have ZERO RESPECT for user's machines. Holy hell.
- glenngillen
I'd been running into a lot of disk pressure on my system from agents running. I discovered two main causes:
- my approach to using git worktrees for all work. Not entirely surprising, the duplicated build artifacts in each worktree being the main culprit here. There were some limited gains to be had by just being more efficient with how builds were managed but ultimately I just had to limit the number of concurrent features I was working on in a couple of particularly large repos.
- more insidious was the fact I was actually hitting memory limits more than I realised and causing my mac to have to swap heavily. The system was surprisingly still quite performant while this was happening... until it wasn't. Unfortunately as best I can tell the only "fix" when this happens is to restart the machine. There's no way to have the system reclaim any of the swap space once it's written to disk. Which if you have it thrash a couple of times a day (especially easy if you leave something running overnight) adds up very quickly.
- jbellis
this looks like a bug, but even normal happy-path codex creates many GB of logs, openai apparently considers this fine bc it's been going on for months
two things help:
1. fs-level compression, I use ZFS bc Btrfs has massive contention problems with concurrent Rust builds
2. Archive your old sessions using something like sessionwiki (https://github.com/youdie006/sessionwiki), I've integrated this into my control plane (https://github.com/BrokkAi/mjolnir/)
- dingaling911
I'm so glad my first move was to relegate these harnesses to docker containers.
- aaronbrethorst
I've been making a lot of use of DaisyDisk over the past year: https://daisydiskapp.com
- AgharaShyam
look into ~/.bun/install/cache/@openai folder as well.
for some reason I had 11 separate codex and codex-code-mode-host binaries in mine. each weighing about ~300 MB.