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OpenAI Codex bombards SSDs with needless write operations, costing millions
(www.theregister.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
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There's a pretty massive difference in scale and impact here..
Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? I don't know what game it was and how many copies it sold, nor how many Codex users there are, but I assume you already know those details?
500 milliseconds is an eternity in computer time. Doing a 10KB write (very generously large for a logfile) write every 500 milliseconds is something it could do continuously for about 1,000 years before it used up the write capacity of an SSD.
The game was Windrose and it was making over a hundred gigabytes of unnecessary writes per hour at 90,000-130,000 writes per second, for the record.
After the devs tweaked their database caching it went down to 'only' 20-60 writes per second, which still feels insane to me.
They can't have been talking about Windrose either, then, because they very clearly said it was writing log file entries every 500 milliseconds. Either they misunderstood the scale too, or they were talking about a different issue, because 500 milliseconds is definitely not on the same scale as what Codex or Windrose are being accused of. The game issue they described is not comparable to either of those scenarios.
cue the scene from Airplane 2 where the Steward explains they have been knocked of course by just a "tad"