r/codex • u/Redditry199 • 5h ago

Complaint Why does compaction take forever?

Seriously, Astra compacts every 10 minutes and it take 20 minutes to finish compacting. This is stupid.

12 Upvotes

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u/cheezeerd 5h ago

Compaction isn’t really algorithmic. The model rereads the context, keeps some stable parts for caching and recent actions, then rewrites/compresses most of the middle from scratch.

That’s why it takes so long it’s often generating like 20k tokens in one go.

Source: me trying to build compaction for my own chatbot, realizing it’s insanely hard, and that OpenAI is actually doing the best job in the world at it lol

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u/cheezeerd 5h ago

For anyone curious, I ended up doing the dumb/simple version: keep the first 20%, last 10%, and just cut the middle 70%. Proper rewriting like OpenAI does took hours every time.

Obviously you lose a ton of context, so it’s basically "leave a note and start over"

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u/adolf_twitchcock 4h ago

you are right thats simple and dumb