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Codex spawned 1000s of Zombies even after not being used for several days #12554
Closed as not planned
Description
What version of Codex CLI is running?
codex-cli 0.104.0
What subscription do you have?
None
Which model were you using?
No response
What platform is your computer?
Darwin 24.6.0 arm64 arm
What terminal emulator and version are you using (if applicable)?
Terminal.app
What issue are you seeing?
^ Title codex has spawned 1000s of Zombie processes that essentially crashed my computer as no other process could be spawned. You can see the count by the scroll indicator of the attached screenshot, it's tiny even after filtering by codex!
What steps can reproduce the bug?
N/A. Unsure. I have not used Codex in several days.
What is the expected behavior?
Not create or leave behind so many processes, especially when not being used?
Additional information
No response
Edit: I checked the exact count -
This 2256 process is after I manually killed 100s. So indeed, there were 1000s of these zombie processes.
Activity
github-actions commentedon Feb 23, 2026
Potential duplicates detected. Please review them and close your issue if it is a duplicate.
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avishj commentedon Feb 23, 2026
Even after killing all of them via
sudo pkill -f codex, I'm still getting non stop codex instances spawning. This is despite not opening codex once.163 new instances in 2.5 hrs, roughly 1 instance per minute. There is probably some cron setup within codex that is auto launching codex in the background?
avishj commentedon Feb 23, 2026
Nevermind, on debugging this further, this seems to be a bug in tddworks/ClaudeBar.
I will raise an issue there, but is it possible for codex to not spawn if it detects a certain number of existing instances? There could probably be some reasonable limit even considering power users?