Update at Jun 22, 2026: the following 2 PRs are merged today, it could avoid 85%… logs(feedback from my codex), so let me close this issue.
Thanks @jif-oai for the fix.
- https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/29432
- https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/29457
> Following is the original issue
## Issue
Codex is continuously writing a large amount of data to the local SQLite feedback log database:
- `~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite`
- `~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite-wal`
- `~/.codex/logs_2.sqlite-shm`
On my machine, after about **21 days of uptime**, the main SSD has written about **37 TB**. Process/file-level checks show Codex SQLite logs are the main continuous writer.
That extrapolates to roughly **640 TB/year**. On a **1 TB SSD**, that is about **640 full-drive writes per year**. Some consumer SSDs are rated around **600 TBW**, so this could consume roughly a full drive's warranted write endurance in less than a year.
## Evidence1
A later snapshot makes the write amplification easier to see:
| metric | value |
| --- | ---: |
| current `logs_2.sqlite` file size | 1.2 GiB |
| current retained rows | 506,149 |
| total allocated row ids | 5,543,677,486 |
So the database currently retains only ~0.5M rows, while the SQLite AUTOINCREMENT counter has already advanced past 5.5B ids.
That is roughly a 10,000x gap between retained rows and historical inserted row ids. Even using the current ~1.2 GiB database size as a rough baseline, this points to 10TB+ scale historical log churn, before accounting for WAL, indexes, pruning, checkpoints, page rewrites, and filesystem/device-level write amplification.
## Evidence2
Current retained rows in `logs_2.sqlite`:
| metric | value |
| --- | ---: |
| retained rows | 681,774 |
| estimated retained log content | 1,035.6 MiB |
Level distribution:
| level | estimated MiB | byte % |
| --- | ---: | ---: |
| TRACE | 732.5 | 70.7% |
| INFO | 266.5 | 25.7% |
| DEBUG | 30.6 | 3.0% |
| WARN | 5.9 | 0.6% |
Largest target+level pairs:
| target | level | estimated MiB |
| --- | --- | ---: |
| `codex_api::endpoint::responses_websocket` | TRACE | 527.4 |
| `codex_otel.log_only` | INFO | 141.2 |
| `codex_otel.trace_safe` | INFO | 121.2 |
| `log` | TRACE | 97.4 |
| `codex_client::transport` | TRACE | 60.1 |
| `codex_core::stream_events_utils` | DEBUG | 27.5 |
| `codex_api::sse::responses` | TRACE | 19.1 |
The top sources are mostly global TRACE logs, mirrored telemetry logs, and raw websocket/SSE payload logging. `TRACE` alone is about **70.7%** of retained bytes. `codex_otel.log_only` + `codex_otel.trace_safe` add another **25.3%**. Filtering these categories should remove roughly **96%** of retained log bytes in this sample without fully disabling feedback logs.
<details>
<summary>Sanitized examples from the most frequent TRACE source: <code>target=log</code></summary>
These are high-frequency retained samples. Raw websocket/SSE payload bodies are intentionally not included because they may contain private conversation content.
```text
128,764x TRACE log: inotify event: ... mask: OPEN, name: Some("ld.so.cache")
37,982x TRACE log: inotify event: ... mask: OPEN, name: Some("locale.alias")
23,843x TRACE log: inotify event: ... mask: OPEN, name: Some("passwd")
3,639x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/compat.rs:131 AllowStd.with_context
3,505x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/lib.rs:245 WebSocketStream.with_context
3,362x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/compat.rs:154 Read.read
3,356x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/compat.rs:157 Read.with_context read -> poll_read
3,230x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/lib.rs:294 Stream.poll_next
3,227x TRACE log: <tokio-tungstenite checkout>/src/lib.rs:304 Stream.with_context poll_next -> read()
3,213x TRACE log: inotify event: ... mask: OPEN, name: Some("nsswitch.conf")
2,001x TRACE log: WouldBlock
1,217x TRACE log: Masked: false
1,169x TRACE log: Opcode: Data(Text)
1,169x TRACE log: First: 11000001
```
</details>
<details>
<summary>Sanitized examples from frequent INFO sources</summary>
The dominant INFO sources are mostly repeated OpenTelemetry mirror events. IDs are redacted.
```text
843x INFO codex_client::custom_ca:
using system root certificates because no CA override environment variable was selected ...
334x INFO codex_otel.trace_safe:
session_loop{thread_id=<redacted>}:submission_dispatch{otel.name="op.dispatch.user_input" submission.id=<redacted> codex.op="user_input"}:turn{otel.name="session_task.turn" thread.id=<redacted> ...}
333x INFO codex_otel.log_only:
session_loop{thread_id=<redacted>}:submission_dispatch{otel.name="op.dispatch.user_input" submission.id=<redacted> codex.op="user_input"}:turn{otel.name="session_task.turn" thread.id=<redacted> ...}
332x INFO codex_otel.log_only:
session_loop{thread_id=<redacted>}:submission_dispatch{otel.name="op.dispatch.user_input_with_turn_context" submission.id=<redacted> codex.op="user_input_with_turn_context"}:turn{otel.name="session_task.turn" thread.id=<redacted> ...}
332x INFO codex_otel.trace_safe:
session_loop{thread_id=<redacted>}:submission_dispatch{otel.name="op.dispatch.user_input_with_turn_context" submission.id=<redacted> codex.op="user_input_with_turn_context"}:turn{otel.name="session_task.turn" thread.id=<redacted> ...}
```
</details>
## Write amplification
The retained DB size hides the real write volume. In a 15-second sample:
| metric | before | after |
| --- | ---: | ---: |
| retained rows | 681,774 | 681,774 |
| max row id | 5,003,347,015 | 5,003,383,226 |
About **36,211 rows were inserted in 15 seconds**, while retained row count stayed flat. This suggests continuous insert-and-prune write amplification: rows are inserted, indexed, written to WAL, then pruned.
## Likely cause
The SQLite feedback log sink is installed with a global TRACE default:
```rust
Targets::new().with_default(Level::TRACE)
```
This persists all targets at TRACE level by default, including dependency/internal logs and large raw protocol payloads.
## Proposed fix
Keep feedback logs enabled, but narrow what is persisted by default:
1. Do not use global TRACE for the SQLite feedback log sink.
2. Drop or raise thresholds for low-value dependency noise, especially `target=log`, `hyper_util`, tokio-tungstenite internals, inotify spam, and low-level OpenTelemetry SDK logs.
3. Avoid persisting full raw websocket/SSE payloads by default. Store summaries instead: event kind, duration, success/error, token usage, and payload byte length.
4. Avoid persisting mirrored `codex_otel.log_only` / `codex_otel.trace_safe` events unless they are explicitly useful for feedback debugging.
5. Add a global logs DB size/write cap. Per-thread caps are not enough when many threads/processes exist.
An optional escape hatch such as `sqlite_logs_enabled = false` would still be useful, but the main fix should be better default filtering.
## Related issues and discussions
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/17320
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/24275
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/26374
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/22444
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/20563
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/27020
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/27911
- https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/21134
- https://github.com/openai/codex/pull/12969
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