[Windows][Remote] Opening a task from Android triggers git.exe crash storm and system-wide OOM

What version of the Codex App are you using (From “About Codex” dialog)?

Version 26.825.51511

What subscription do you have?

Pro Plan

What platform is your computer?

Microsoft Windows NT 10.0.26200.0 x64

What issue are you seeing?

[Windows][Remote][Critical] Opening a Remote chat exhausts system commit, crashes many git.exe processes, and can crash Windows

Severity

Critical. This has repeatedly exhausted approximately 49 GB of Windows commit, destabilized the desktop, crashed multiple processes, and on one run caused a VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE blue screen/reboot. There is a material risk of losing unsaved work. Please do not ask the reporter to reproduce it again on this machine.

Summary

Opening an existing Codex Remote chat from the ChatGPT mobile app can cause the connected Windows laptop to consume all available virtual memory. A prompt does not need to be sent: simply opening the chat has reproduced the problem.

The latest test was made after disabling desktop ambient suggestions. The relevant desktop logs contain zero ambient-suggestion entries, but the failure still occurred. In the seconds around the Remote refresh, the desktop app logged a stale automatic Git snapshot and a batch of 15 simultaneous review-summary Git operations across 15 worktrees. Windows reported low virtual memory 28 seconds after that batch began, followed by multiple git.exe crashes and bitmap-allocation failure.

The repository contents are not the user action that triggers the failure. The problem has also reproduced when opening a Remote chat attached to “Pause Toshy,” the reporter's smallest codebase. The common trigger across multiple days is opening the Remote chat from the phone.

Environment

• Desktop app package: OpenAI.Codex 26.825.6671.0 (Microsoft Store)
• Desktop executable version: ChatGPT.exe 151.0.7922.174
• Bundled Codex: codex-cli 0.151.0-alpha.7.2
• OS: Windows 11 Home, version 10.0.26200, build 26200
• Git: git version 2.54.0.windows.1, C:\Program Files\Git\cmd\git.exe
• RAM: 15.71 GB
• Pagefile: 30,720 MB allocated
• Total commit limit: 49,081,217,024 bytes (about 45.7 GiB)
• GPUs:
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU, driver 32.0.16.1062
  • Intel UHD Graphics, driver 31.0.101.4255
• Both mobile and desktop apps were updated before testing.
• Desktop Remote was paired and enabled normally.

After the latest reboot, the laptop was stable at about 13.8 GB committed out of the 49.1 GB limit, confirming that the normal baseline does not exhaust commit.

Reliable user trigger

1. Leave the ChatGPT/Codex desktop app running on the Windows host with Remote enabled.
2. On the paired phone, open Remote.
3. Open an existing local Codex chat.
4. Do not send a prompt.
5. Within seconds to roughly one minute, system commit is exhausted. Windows shows out-of-virtual-memory and git.exe application-error dialogs; other UI operations begin failing for lack of memory. A reboot may be required.

This has happened repeatedly over multiple days. The reporter has stopped further reproduction because one run blue-screened Windows and later runs made the whole desktop unusable.

Expected result

Opening a Remote chat should hydrate its messages and project state without starting unbounded background work or materially changing host memory use.

Actual result

• Windows exhausts all available virtual memory despite a 30 GB pagefile.
• Many automatically launched git.exe processes crash.
• Observed Git exceptions include:
  • 0xc00000fd (STATUS_STACK_OVERFLOW) in ntdll.dll
  • 0xc0000005 access violations in msvcrt.dll
• Windows displays “Out of Virtual Memory.”
• Windows later displays “Insufficient memory to create the bitmap.”
• A PowerShell diagnostic process could not initialize during the incident (0xC0000142-style process initialization failure), consistent with system-wide resource starvation.
• One prior run ended in bugcheck 0x116 (VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE) with parameter 0xC000009A (insufficient system resources).

Latest post-mitigation timeline

Local time is America/Vancouver (UTC-7). UTC timestamps are from Codex desktop logs.

Local time	UTC	Evidence
21:30:16	04:30:16	Desktop session starts.
21:30:23	04:30:23	review_model starts an automatic review-summary Git batch across 15 separate worktrees.
21:32:08	04:32:08	Automatic turn_diff_analytics starts git add --sparse --pathspec-from-file=- --pathspec-file-nul in the project.
21:32:49	04:32:49	That command is cancelled after 41.379 seconds with 158,728 stderr bytes; desktop reports Git snapshot became stale.
21:32:50–51	04:32:50–51	Two refresh_remote_control cycles occur. A second batch of 15 review-summary / review_model Git commands begins simultaneously across 15 worktrees.
21:33:18	04:33:18	Windows Resource Exhaustion Detector receives low-virtual-memory notification.
21:33:20	04:33:20	Detector itself has a memory-allocation failure and cannot diagnose the top consumer.
21:33:25–51	04:33:25–51	Five separate git.exe Application Error events occur. Four are stack overflows in ntdll.dll; one is an access violation in msvcrt.dll.
21:33:42	04:33:42	Two visible git.exe dialogs report memory could not be written/read.
21:36:14	04:36:14	Desktop still reports another stale Git snapshot.
21:36:43	04:36:43	User manually restarts the computer because the desktop is unusable.

The second 15-worktree batch has one shared start timestamp (startTimeMs=1788237170508), so these were concurrent operations rather than a sequential scan.

Earlier severe run (same day)

• 21:15:43: a Remote chat is resumed. The reporter says this was the tiny “Pause Toshy” project and no message was typed.
• 21:15:55: an ambient_suggestion_generation background conversation starts in this earlier run.
• 21:15:59, 21:16:01, 21:16:11: Remote refresh activity is logged.
• 21:16:47: Windows reports low virtual memory.
• 21:16:49: Resource Exhaustion Detector allocation fails.
• 21:17:07–21:17:45: Windows records 11 git.exe Application Error events and 19 git.exe application-error popups.
• 21:18:15: unexpected reboot (Kernel-Power event 41).
• Windows Error Reporting subsequently records a blue screen:
  • Event: BlueScreen
  • Bugcheck: 0x116 (VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE)
  • Parameter: 0xC000009A (insufficient system resources)
  • Report ID: 1eefac20-14e0-4601-896f-e93a916c8ab5
  • Minidump: C:\Windows\Minidump\083126-17031-01.dmp

Ambient suggestions may have amplified that earlier incident, but they are not required for the failure: the latest incident reproduced with ambient suggestions disabled and no ambient entries in either desktop log.

Ambient-suggestions A/B result

The latest test used this supported desktop setting:

[desktop]
ambient-suggestions-enabled = false

The setting was verified in %USERPROFILE%\.codex\config.toml, and both logs from the latest session contain zero matches for ambient_suggestion or ambient-suggestion. The same OOM/Git failure still occurred. Therefore ambient suggestions are not the root cause, although they may add load when enabled.

Windows event evidence from the latest run

• Resource Exhaustion Detector:
  • Event 1003 at 21:33:18: low virtual memory notification
  • Event 1007 at 21:33:20: detector memory-allocation failure
  • Event 1008 at 21:33:20: Windows failed to diagnose the low-memory condition
• Application Error event 1000, git.exe:
  • Report IDs 63dabd38-bf57-44e6-bc4d-1dc2f2e6f35d
  • be8a7ad6-1aad-46de-9ee6-e0dda6d4007d
  • ae74762c-20cd-4ab3-8f25-5fb8d6cdf549
  • efd4b3af-8b6c-453e-b5f5-b7d88e000c06
  • d728eb39-15c8-406d-adb5-d0cf9cf902b5
• WER preserved several Git minidumps and one memory.hdmp under %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportArchive / ReportQueue.

Mitigations already tried

All of the following were completed before the latest reproduction:

• Updated ChatGPT on both phone and laptop.
• Removed and re-paired the phone/desktop Remote connection.
• Fully restarted the desktop app.
• Used Windows Repair, Reset, and reinstall/recovery flows.
• Closed ChatGPT Classic; only the current desktop app was used.
• Tested a small, focused task and the smallest available codebase.
• Rebooted Windows between incidents.
• Confirmed a large, system-managed pagefile (30 GB).
• Disabled desktop ambient suggestions and restarted the app.

These steps did not resolve the issue.

Engineering hypothesis (not asserted as proven root cause)

The strongest evidence points to an automatic Git review/snapshot lifecycle triggered or refreshed while Remote hydrates a chat:

1. turn_diff_analytics starts a Git snapshot.
2. The snapshot becomes stale and is cancelled.
3. Remote refreshes immediately afterward.
4. review_model fans out Git work across many saved worktrees at once.
5. Refresh/retry or overlapping snapshot work consumes the system commit limit.
6. Once commit is exhausted, Git, desktop rendering, diagnostics, and GPU recovery fail as collateral damage.

The logs prove the overlapping automatic Git work, the stale-snapshot cycle, the timing, and the system-wide OOM. They do not prove which process owns every byte because the Windows Resource Exhaustion Detector also ran out of memory before it could produce a top-consumer report.

Requested engineering checks

• Correlate Remote chat hydration with review_model, review-summary, and turn_diff_analytics refreshes.
• Check whether stale Git snapshots are cancelled cleanly and whether child processes/resources are released.
• Cap Git worker concurrency globally and per project/worktree.
• Coalesce duplicate Remote/review refreshes and cancel obsolete work before starting another batch.
• Add hard memory/commit safeguards so background review work cannot exhaust the host.
• Record worker spawn count, active worker count, aggregate commit, and cancellation outcome in diagnostics.
• Provide a supported setting to disable automatic Git review/snapshot refresh independently of normal Git access.

Attachments and integrity manifest

Before sharing raw logs, review them for private paths, project names, and other sensitive content.

Latest run (ambient disabled)

• %LOCALAPPDATA%\Codex\Logs\2026\09\01\codex-desktop-c1f6623b-d3f3-4b17-aab1-bc1ef756df5e-23368-t0-i1-043016-0.log
  • 178,695 bytes
  • SHA-256 C00B5B06778B91E064474ED6568D8C1DFBD32F85F979C8DECE4499F7A9C291BF
• %LOCALAPPDATA%\Codex\Logs\2026\09\01\codex-desktop-c1f6623b-d3f3-4b17-aab1-bc1ef756df5e-23368-t1-i1-043020-0.log
  • 78,844 bytes
  • SHA-256 4A24C8E233465FE0BD88B72C4EEF78C9184708B7C98329852273EE1F9D6BDC24

Earlier severe run

• %LOCALAPPDATA%\Codex\Logs\2026\09\01\codex-desktop-8bda396c-0905-4ecf-ba07-da726759ee36-10668-t0-i1-040322-0.log
  • 308,247 bytes
  • SHA-256 465E8C8107BEB913A7571DBEBBECE8EB61DA174B1CF830B7B09C72EDCD3E1EF9

Photographs captured during the latest incident

1. git.exe null write error, SHA-256 1047609D4A5B577603C91443F5B84C19EFBDD181A253D1442AF872A0F71B2619
2. git.exe invalid read error, SHA-256 BA90DA571E5AB4C1929AD74C4B68EC379E86550E091A10BB97D8CAE6569217EA
3. “Insufficient memory to create the bitmap,” SHA-256 3B3D9FF940BA84B81336F22781F1D3A9FCC033F5EB44B1740E3D1A2ED59EACCE

Relevant task IDs

• Current evidence task: 01a05ad7-361a-7b32-9d62-9e050d0b9d8a
• Small-project Remote reproduction: 019f23d5-bf2b-76c1-9089-895d77087375
• Earlier automatically created ambient conversation: 01a05b2e-49c9-7a21-bd0d-71dadf52daf9

Safety note

The reporter has already reproduced this many times across several days and has suffered repeated full-system OOM events and a blue screen. The existing logs, Windows events, WER dumps, photographs, and task/session data should be used for investigation instead of requesting another reproduction.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

1. Run Codex Desktop 26.825.51511 on the Windows laptop.
2. Open the latest ChatGPT Android app on a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra.
3. Open Remote and select any Codex task, including the tiny Pause project.
4. Do not type or send a message.
5. The task never loads. Windows memory is exhausted, git.exe errors appear, bitmap allocation fails, and the laptop requires a reboot.

What is the expected behavior?

the expected is I can see the chat remote on my phone, and give it instructions.

Additional information

Feedback/session ID: 01a05ad7-361a-7b32-9d62-9e050d0b9d8a

This reproduces across multiple projects, including a very small repository, and still occurs with ambient suggestions and background refresh disabled. It begins merely by opening the remote task; no message needs to be sent.

Please do not request another reproduction. Repeated attempts have caused full-system out-of-memory events and one Windows blue screen.

The complete raw evidence bundle is available privately to OpenAI on request.

Start with the two latest desktop logs under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Codex\Logs\2026\09\01 and correlate refresh_remote_control with review_model, review-summary, and turn_diff_analytics. Compare the stale-snapshot cancellation and concurrent worktree batches with the attached Windows and WER evidence. Done means identifying the overlapping-work or cleanup failure and preventing background Git work from exhausting host memory, with diagnostics for worker counts and cancellation outcomes.