The performance of the new UI redesigned Codex app is abysmal.
There’s noticeable typing input lag, and the highlight of entries in the menu bar menus or account menu (where you check usage) lags heavily behind the mouse cursor. The scrolling of conversation is also extremely jerky.
Everything just feels like it runs at 10-15 FPS at best.
Even the pre-UI redesign app was very slow and clunky, but this poor UI performance has pushed it beyond over the edge into unusable territory. Using such a slow and clunky UI that can’t keep up with my input it’s just too much dread and stress to deal with.
Comparison video between two apps: Codex and VSCode:
Codex is just a conversation viewer with some rudimentary code viewer and text editor.
VSCode on the other hand is a full fledged IDE/Code editor with vastly more functionality and complexity.
Both are electron apps so UI framework is not to blame.
How does $850+ billion dollar corporation release an app in this state as the primary user facing frontend on the world’s most used desktop operating system for their $100+/month service?
How do you have an access to supposedly beyond SOTA internal models excellent at software engineering yet are incapable of producing a simple glorified text viewer app that runs above 15FPS on a desktop PC with high end GPU, CPU and dozens of gigabytes of RAM?
Very strange, I just checked both on my Mac and Windows and there is no lag, it’s blazingly fast. I use the latest version 26.924.22138 (released 26 September).
I notice you basically have no load at all in the system which is even more strange..
There’s nothing strange about having no load on a high end 24 thread CPU and RTX4070Ti Super GPU when merely hovering over UI entries in a simple 2D UI app that does nothing else.
Out of curiosity, what are the specs of your Windows machine? CPU, GPU, GPU driver version and RAM? Also, do you by any chance know if your mouse has high polling rate (over 500hz)?
Huh… I got also 617.14 driver. My mouse polling rate is 1000hz, but 150Hz should make no difference. You have same amount of RAM as me, CPU or comparable performance, and GPU of comparable performance. I also do have app on a SSD. We have almost same PC.
Now I am getting paranoid
I will try to uninstall ESET Internet Security perhaps…
Also, the video is recorded at 120FPS and slowed down to 50% (60FPS) to better show the issue. Are you sure you have no lag when hovering over menu entries at all? Or just less lag (less delay between menu entry highlight after cursor moves over it)?
Interesting… when I collapse all the recents chats and projects and have blank new chat (What should we build in in the background) I get almost similar performance to yours. It’s still a bit laggy, but not horrible.
When I expand Projects and Recents, and the main UI area is displaying some longer conversation, the lag becomes way more apparent.
How much RAM is your Codex app consuming “at rest”, i.e. you are not doing anything with it? I noticed it was like 1,3GB on your side, for me it’s 200MB. Not sure if you were cooking something with it though when you recorded the screen? Even that amount of RAM shouldn’t do anything to your system (your Chrome consumed more), maybe the UI lag happens at that memory consumption? Or maybe the issue is that something was eating that much RAM?
I’ll try to push mine as hard as I can later and report back!
The memory usage is like that as soon as I open the app.
It’s worth mentioning that the UI update somehow populated my Recents with a LOT of old archived chats for some reason. The amount of lag seems to be directly proportional to how much UI is going on. When I expand all the projects, open long convo, and open a sidebar with file tree of a project of non trivial structure. I can get it to be even much laggier than on the video.
I had to blur out the confidential content, but the point is about UI density example:
Ok then that’s it for sure. Basically all the past chats are being loaded in memory and it’s slowing things down.
I wouldn’t change anything under .codex\sessions\* nor .codex\session_index.jsonl.
I’d check in your Settings → Archived → Archived chats. If the archived chats are appearing in your actual recents, then that’s a clear bug, maybe some screw up with your specific account, and it’s overloading your app.
If that happens use /feedback in the Codex app and send all the details to the devs. Or if you still see the issue and it’s unbearable just use the /feedback anyway
But yeah a workaround would be to archive the very old chats that are of no use to you. Unless the archived ones are appearing in the recents as I mentioned, then it’s a bug.
It’s a bit more complicated, but yes, I’ve already filed the bug report along with submitting the performance trace, but I also let Astra analyze the performance trace file that was sent. If you are interested in details, I am attaching them below:
I’m having the exact same issue. It only happens on the home screen; once I go into Settings, everything works fine. It’s really frustrating. Normally, they roll out dozens of updates a day, but this bug has been around for two days now without a single patch.
Is it the same as the OP where if you roll up the recent chats the lag gets better or disappears? Let’s see what OAI says, OP has already written a bug report.
Amount of conversation text labels displayed on some sidebar in a simple chat app should not have measurable effect on performance in any software written in the past 20 years on any system made in the past 20 years.
Remember AIM, ICQ or Skype? Remember how many contacts did you have in your contact list? How long the conversation history was, with all sorts of multimedia like pictures attached? All that ran on a software orders of magnitude slower than what we use today, and it ran without any lag or performance issues.
