Codex Desktop bug: 8.74 GiB state plus MLX task exhausts macOS swap
alaemiryoung · ghdev · 2026-10-16
openai/codex issue #54416 documents a system-wide memory incident on macOS 26 with Apple silicon. A watchdog stackshot captured per-process footprints at failure time:
- Codex desktop main process: 3.19 GiB; largest renderer: 4.45 GiB; all 11 renderers: 5.55 GiB; main + renderers combined 8.74 GiB; all 47 processes in the ChatGPT bundle: 10.62 GiB.
- A separate Python MLX transcription workload launched by the Codex agent added 4.97 GiB right before swap exhaustion; WindowServer then timed out and the desktop session was rebuilt, interrupting other apps.
The author deliberately splits this into three issues needing different investigations: large retained desktop state, the agent's resource-unaware workload choice, and the OS-wide failure once swap could no longer grow — with full snapshot data attached.
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