What people report
On the OpenAI Developer Community forum, a thread titled "ChatGPT gets extremely slow in long browser chats" has been running since March 2025. One user wrote that a chat gets "so slow it crashes constantly, forcing you to start a new conversation". In January 2026, another described the feeling of a 60 to 90 second wait for every turn.
Those are users' reports, not measurements, and we didn't find an answer from OpenAI in that thread. But the pattern people describe is consistent: the longer the chat, the slower it feels.
Quick things to try
These won't change how long the chat is, but they're worth a minute:
- Reload the page. It sometimes helps for a while.
- Close other heavy tabs.
- Try the ChatGPT app instead of the browser, or the other way round.
If the chat is still slow, the length of the chat is probably part of the problem, and that only goes one way.
When to start fresh instead
Slowness often comes with other signs that a chat has run its course:
- It forgets a rule you set early on.
- It brings back an idea you dropped.
- It repeats itself, or goes in circles.
When you see those, a new chat is usually the faster way forward, even before ChatGPT tells you the chat has reached its maximum length.
Start fresh without losing the work
Don't paste the whole old chat into the new one: you'd bring the bulk back. Start the new chat with a short message instead:
- The goal, in one line.
- What's decided.
- The rules you kept repeating.
- Where you stopped: the latest version of the work.
The faster way: let Uncook write the handoff
Uncook doesn't make ChatGPT faster. What it does is write that handoff for you. On the ChatGPT page, click the Uncook icon and pick Handoff. You get a prompt with your goal, what's decided, the rules you set and where you stopped.
Read it, change what you want, then copy it into a new chat.
Questions people ask
Will Uncook speed up my chat? No. It helps you move to a new chat with what matters, so you don't have to stay in the slow one.
Is my old chat lost if I start a new one? No. It stays in your history, and you can still read and copy from it.
Is the slowness a ChatGPT bug? We don't know the cause, and OpenAI hasn't explained it in that forum thread. What users report is that it gets worse as the chat grows.
Start fresh,
without starting over.
Add to Chrome
We don't keep the conversations you bring. When you click Send to Uncook in the extension window, the extension sends the chat from your tab to our servers, encrypted, for up to 30 minutes, and we delete it as soon as your Uncook page opens it. What Uncook makes from it is kept as a task, for as long as our Privacy page says. Neither your chats nor your tasks are used to train AI models.