Bug: Progressive memory leak in ChatGPT web client causes escalating freezes / tab crashes

ChatGPT Bugs
1

Bug: Progressive memory leak in ChatGPT web client causes escalating freezes / tab crashes

Environment: Chrome desktop (also reproduced in Incognito with all extensions disabled). Not reproducible in the ChatGPT mobile app.

Summary

A ChatGPT tab becomes progressively slower and eventually freezes/locks up the longer it stays open and in use — regardless of which conversation is active. Opening a “New Chat” does not reset the underlying tab state, since ChatGPT is a single-page app; the leak persists and compounds across conversations within the same tab/session.

Symptoms observed

  • Chrome Task Manager shows CPU usage climbing over time in a single ChatGPT tab, eventually exceeding 100–140% sustained, while every other open tab stays near 0%.
  • Memory footprint for the tab grows into the 500MB–1.3GB+ range (vs. ~150–250MB for comparable tabs).
  • GPU memory for the tab climbs into the tens of MB while unrelated tabs stay at 0K.
  • DOM node count creeps upward over the session (observed ~6,371 → ~7,749 nodes over ~2 minutes) and does not return to baseline.
  • Reproducible in a fresh Incognito window with zero extensions enabled, ruling out extension interference.
  • Confirmed via chrome://process-internals and Chrome DevTools Performance recordings that the same browser process/tab persists across “New Chat” clicks (Process ID unchanged), carrying over CPU/memory state from prior conversations.

DevTools Performance trace findings

A ~2-minute Performance recording on an active session showed a series of long main-thread-blocking tasks, all attributable to V8 garbage collection (incremental marking, concurrent marking, scavenging, weak-reference cleanup):

Time into recording Main-thread freeze duration
14.6s 4.2s
22.6s 4.5s
37.4s 10.0s
47.4s 13.5s
60.9s 19.2s
80.1s 31.1s

Freeze duration roughly doubles each cycle within a two-minute window — consistent with a genuine, actively worsening memory leak rather than normal GC overhead. JS heap usage oscillates between ~90MB and ~700MB throughout, with the post-GC floor trending upward rather than returning to baseline.

All heavy JS execution during these freezes traces back to an anonymous function within ChatGPT’s own client bundle (https://chatgpt.com/cdn/assets/2340486e-*.js), not to any browser extension.

Chrome’s own Web Vitals panel confirms user-facing impact: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) of 2,640ms (“poor”) recorded on a basic click/typing interaction in an otherwise fresh tab.

Reproduction steps

  1. Open chatgpt.com in a fresh Chrome tab (Incognito, no extensions, confirmed reproducible).
  2. Use the client normally for several minutes — send messages, switch between conversations, especially longer/image-heavy ones.
  3. Monitor via Chrome Task Manager (Shift+Esc): CPU and memory for the tab climb progressively.
  4. Record a DevTools Performance trace during continued use: observe escalating GC-driven main-thread freezes.

Expected behavior

Sustained use of ChatGPT’s web client, including switching between conversations, should not cause unbounded, escalating memory growth or multi-second UI freezes.

Suspected cause

Likely a DOM/React re-render or virtualization issue where old message content, images, or listeners aren’t being fully unmounted/dereferenced between renders, causing objects to remain reachable and preventing garbage collection from reclaiming them.

2

I noticed the downloadable desktop client starts using large amounts of memory, once the new feature arrived when we could view the prompt timeline. The memory usage keeps ballooning up to 2gb or more now.

3

Thanks for the detailed report, @UniversalVenom, and for adding the desktop client behavior, @InnocentStar. The rising memory usage and worsening GC freezes you documented definitely look worth investigating further.

Please send a support ticket to support@openai.com with the screenshots, heap/memory details, Chrome Task Manager data, and a HAR recording that captures the slowdown. Including the browser/app version, OS, approximate session length, and whether image-heavy chats make it worse would also help the team investigate.

Once submitted, please drop the case ID here so it can be referenced.

-Mark G.

4

I use to work with two tabs one for project and one for analysis. Now it is degraded. Even one tab performance is not at acceptable level. I still use 5.5

5

+1 can confirm this is impacting me, especially in memory constrained environments. I found this thread looking to see if someone profiled this down to a root cause. It’s def Ion sprawling unreasonably as conversations grow.