Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and rapidly consume SSD endurance · Issue #28224 · openai/codex · GitHub

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.

Evidence

Current retained rows in logs_2.sqlite:

Level distribution:

Largest target+level pairs:

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.

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

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> ...}

Write amplification

The retained DB size hides the real write volume. In a 15-second sample:

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:

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.

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