Codex Desktop crash dumps fill user disks at 5 GB a day
An open issue on the Codex Desktop repository, now 31 comments deep, reports the app writing a crash dump per second to a folder that never clears, with one user hitting 323 GB and about four million files before noticing.
Image: GitHub
Why it mattersA Codex Desktop seat on a developer laptop can quietly fill the disk inside a working week, and the only immediate action the thread describes is a cron job the user has to add themselves.
A Codex Desktop user who checks their Mac disk this week may find tens of gigabytes of crash dumps sitting in a folder they never opened. GitHub issue 25921 on openai/codex, opened on 2 June 2026 and still live, documents the Codex Desktop app writing paired .dmp and _sidecar.json files into its Crashpad pending directory and never clearing them. The thread now runs to 31 comments, with reports of 59 GB, 100 GB and in the latest comment 323 GB across both the current and legacy paths.
What the issue says is happening
The opening report, from GitHub user Jolg42 on Codex Desktop version 26.527.60818, is that the folder at ~/Library/Application Support/com.openai.codex/web/Crashpad/pending grew to 4.9 GB and 54,504 files in one day. The traceback the issue quotes shows the browser helper crashing in a Mach IPC call, dumping itself, restarting and immediately crashing again. The commenter ReymondAkpanya measured the rate on 21 September at exactly one dump per second.
The maintainer dnakov replied on 14 June that the problem was fixed on later macOS versions, and in version 26.5. Reports in the same thread after that date disagree. Users have confirmed the dumps still accumulate on versions 26.602, 26.715, 26.825, 26.831, 26.930 and 26.1007. The commenter ahmedkhan25, writing on 17 October 2026, reports about 323 GB across the two paths and roughly 4.04 million files.
What the thread offers as a workaround
The workarounds posted in the comments are all client-side. A cron job that deletes the files in the pending folder on a schedule, making the folder read-only with chmod 500 to stop new writes, and moving the whole Crashpad folder to the trash and restarting the app. None of these fix the underlying crash loop; they just stop the paired files from staying on disk.
Why the folder matters
Crashpad is Chromium's crash-reporter library, which Codex Desktop uses because the app ships as a browser-based client. The pending folder is where a dump sits before Crashpad uploads it. If upload never completes, the files remain, and a crash loop in the handler itself writes one new file every second with no code path to clear old ones.
A developer running Codex Desktop on a work laptop with the default 256 GB disk can lose a working week of writes before noticing. On a company-managed Mac the same files travel into Time Machine and backup snapshots, so the cost multiplies. There is no setting inside Codex Desktop to cap the folder, and no documentation on cleaning it, so a user who has not read a 31-comment GitHub thread will not know the files are theirs to delete.
The issue remains open as of 17 October 2026, with no code fix referenced in the thread.
Source
Codex Desktop continuously generates Crashpad pending dumps · Issue #25921 · openai/codex. Hacker News discussion.
This item was written by an AI system from the linked source. Reveneau is responsible for what it publishes.
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