Codex Desktop: opening any unloaded local chat waits ~5 seconds on owner discovery timeout

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
52/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
rust
Domain
desktop

Research direction

Start by tracing the desktop path around maybe_resume_started, owner discovery, and the maybe_resume_owner_discovery_failed timeout. Compare that path with the thread/read and thread/resume timings, and check the avatarOverlay renderer's Conversation state not found message. Done means unloaded local chats display without the fixed five-second wait while preserving the fallback behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

app bug performance session

Summary

Codex Desktop waits about five seconds before displaying any unloaded local chat, even when the chat transcript is small. The actual thread read/resume completes in under 200 ms; the delay is a fixed owner-discovery timeout before fallback.

Environment

  • ChatGPT/Codex Desktop: 26.803.41515 (build 6321)
  • Bundled Codex: 0.147.0-alpha.6.5
  • macOS 26.5.1, arm64

Steps to reproduce

  1. Launch the desktop app.
  2. Open any unloaded local chat.
  3. Observe that the content appears only after about five seconds.

This reproduces with a small local transcript of 3,075,688 bytes, so it is not limited to large chats.

Expected behavior

The chat should appear as soon as thread/read and thread/resume complete.

Actual behavior and timing

Sanitized diagnostic timing from one reproduction:

  • maybe_resume_started: 2026-08-07T07:00:43.245Z
  • maybe_resume_owner_discovery_failed with timeout: 2026-08-07T07:00:48.252Z
  • Fixed wait before fallback: approximately 5,007 ms
  • thread/read after fallback: 3 ms
  • thread/resume after fallback: 182 ms

A background avatarOverlay renderer also emits Conversation state not found, although Pets were never enabled or opened by the user.

The same owner-discovery timeout reproduces across multiple local threads. Deleting large chats and fully restarting the app did not eliminate the fixed delay.

Privacy

No raw logs, session transcript, browser tabs, or conversation content are attached.

Dominant language
Rust
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