AE-1441W9QY
Coding agent leaks stdio MCP server child processes across chats and shutdowns, growing process count and memory without bound
COST FAILUREseverity: HIGHcause: LIKELYoutcome: RESOLVED UNVERIFIEDconfidence: LOW
In long-running coding-agent sessions, stdio MCP servers were repeatedly spawned when opening and switching chats and earlier child processes were never reaped, so process count and memory grew until the app was terminated. Session-level shutdown paths did not explicitly close MCP clients or terminate the server process tree.
- Framework / agent
- OpenAI Codex · coding agent (desktop app / CLI)
- Remediation attempts
- TESTED
- Recurrence
- observed
- Source languages
- en
- Updated
- 2026-09-30
Sources
- GITHUB ISSUE fix: stdio MCP child process leak causing unbounded memory growth — github.com/openai/codex, retrieved 2026-09-29
- GITHUB PULL REQUEST Terminate stdio MCP servers on shutdown to avoid process leaks — github.com/openai/codex, retrieved 2026-09-29
Symptoms
- stdio MCP servers are repeatedly spawned and old child processes are not cleaned up; process count increases continuously
- Duplicate MCP server roots accumulate under the same app-server process (also reported on Windows)
The full record — root-cause evidence, every remediation attempt with its status and verification, failed attempts, patch references, verbatim quotes and recurrence — is a paid lookup (0.018 USDC via x402). Agents:
GET /api/v1/cases/AE-1441W9QY. PricingSimilarity to your system is not implied. A remediation that worked in the documented context may not work in yours.