Cursor crashes after creating 100s of rg processes

[drew_robi]

Describe the Bug

I can no longer use Cursor as an IDE and have to use VS code again.
The issues is the IDE causes all of the system CPUs to max out at 100% usage for several seconds. Usually this ends up causing Cursor to crash.

Viewing the Mac process space, the issue can be tracked down to at least the fact that over 400 rg processes are being spawned from Cursor in a short period of time.

I originally commented here: Cursor Helper (Rendered) CPU explodes, and then there is a crash - #19 by drew_robi

But received no replies, so I elevating this to a new bug report. I have been unable to use Cursor for about a week now. This is a recent issue after what I believed was a Cursor upgrade. Using VS code is the only work around I have at the moment. Crashes multiple times a day if I try to use it and when not crashing, makes my computer near unusable while the problem is happening due to CPU usage

Steps to Reproduce

Open a very large Angular application
Running of many node commands will trigger the issue
Some I’ve seen do it:

1. pnpm install
2. pnpm exec ng serve
3. Usage of Claude code both inside the IDE and outside the IDE as it interacts with the file system

Expected Behavior

The idea should not increase the CPU utilization for these commands.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

over 400 of these processes spawned:

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.3.5 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 9f33c2e793460d00cf95c06d957e1d1b8135fad0
Date: 2025-07-30T00:25:11.596Z (1 day ago)
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Additional Information

The issue does not reproduce in VS code, seems to be a cursor only bug, or at least an issue with the current cursor version and underlying vs code. VS code version tested:

Version: 1.102.2
Commit: c306e94f98122556ca081f527b466015e1bc37b0
Date: 2025-07-22T12:15:48.520Z
Electron: 35.6.0
ElectronBuildId: 11847422
Chromium: 134.0.6998.205
Node.js: 22.15.1
V8: 13.4.114.21-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

[condor]

hi @drew_robi and thank you for the detailed bug report. Sorry that we did not catch your post in the other thread.

Does this occur when you start Cursor or when you run Agent in Chat?

PS. I just removed your comment in the other thread as its not related to other users issue. Here we can track yours directly.

[drew_robi]

It has not reproduced on startup. It typically happens when I am running node or pnpm commands in the terminal (both inside the IDE terminal and outside in a normal iTerm2 terminal).

I’ve also triggered it when running Claude Code inside of Cursor and from outside of Cursor. I think that it is usually when that Claude is running pnpm commands node commands itself.

I have not been using Cursor’s agent much lately as we are evaluating Claude code at the moment, and it seems that you cannot use Claude Code with cursor’s agent out of the box, since claude code and using claude via an API key are two different licenses.

So using the IDE does not seem to trigger it, but rather file system changes seem to be triggering it. Note that using pnpm and not npm may be something significant since pnpm uses a lot of linking to save HD space compared to other node package managers?

[drew_robi]

Also note that it is not 100% reproducible. Just happens multiple times a day, but not every time. I’m trying to determine more of how to reproduce it and I’ll post back here as I can gather more information or data.

[condor]

Yes that would be great.

Could you also try if this happens in a new copy of the project when using npm?

It looks like pnpm is triggering ripgrep but not sure if it actually exits.

[drew_robi]

What I tried:

1. Quit all instances of Cursor
2. In one of my git worktree working copies, ran a “clean.all” which deletes all node_modules folders, dist directories and such. Basically acts like a clean working copy
3. Opened Cursor in that directory
4. Ran pnpm install
5. CPU did not spike abnormally

Attempt 2:

1. Used a git worktree add ... command to create a new working copy
2. Opened Cursor in that new working copy
3. Opened a new terminal in Cursor
4. Ran pnpm install
5. CPU pegged “normally”. I didn’t see any rg processes spawned

I also tried picking a random Angular library and installing it, pnpm i -w --save @angular/element, it also did not trigger it.

So I’m still not sure the actual trigger for the use case yet

[drew_robi]

Also, our project package.json is not compatible with npm so I can’t try that. For example, we use workspace: style package references that are a pnpm concept. So npm install just fails in our project.

[condor]

Thank you for trying this out in detail and checking further steps. Really appreciate it.

Please let me know if the issue happens again. It would be good to know the cause and find a solution in case this happens also to others.

[andrewh]

Fix for this is rolling out in the next few hours.

[drew_robi]

Looks like you are already on top of it, but here is some information on a crash I just got
cursor-rg-incident-20250801-114343.txt (2.4 KB)

Unforunately the script I wrote failed to get the open files for the process, but hopefully this helps.

[drew_robi]

I just had this happen again today, it does not appear that the rg issue is fixed in the latest cursor.

Happening less often, this was the first crash today, at the end of my day and had none yesterday. Once it happened though it happened 4 more times within the same hour.

Version: 1.4.3 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: e50823e9ded15fddfd743c7122b4724130c25df0
Date: 2025-08-08T17:34:53.060Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0