Cursor Helper (Rendered) CPU explodes, and then there is a crash

Bug Reports
1

I’m on the latest version of Cursor, and the window rendered is exploding the M4 MacBook Pro CPU use, up to 300%. I’ve been using Cursor for a while, and this is the first time that happened.

I checked the process explorer, and it’s not a plugin or anything, it’s the window. Eventually I get a crash that says:

The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: ‘crashed’, code: ‘5’)

Fortunately I’m able to reopen my windows and things like the terminal process are still running. But it’s fairly disconcerting.

2

Would you mind to post actual information that helps the Cursor team debug your issue? Its unclear what the purpose of your post is.

3

Let me know what information you need.

(Weird thing to say “post actual information” when I’ve included the specific process that is causing the crash, the error message and error code, and information about my machine, etc.)

I’m getting crashes, and I would like to not be getting crashes. (Also so weird to say, the purpose of your post. This is clearly a bug report. Oh well)

4

There is a Documentation button on top right here in the forum. It has a page about issue reporting.

probably you would like following link
https://docs.cursor.com/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-guide

8

Matthew, please have a look at the link i posted. it explains what additional info the Cursor Team would need to help you.

1 Like
14

Hey, could you provide a screenshot from the Activity Monitor?

1 Like
15

Screenshot 2025-02-11 at 10.44.23 AM
Screenshot 2025-02-11 at 10.44.23 AM1872×254 41.7 KB

Here you go

16

Screenshot 2025-02-11 at 10.44.54 AM
Screenshot 2025-02-11 at 10.44.54 AM1602×582 62.6 KB

And from Cursor’s process inspector

17

I see high CPU usage (435%) in the file test_openai.py and significant memory consumption (3146 MB). What is your project about? Maybe you’re using a lot of background requests, especially if it’s related to LLM.

18

That’s probably all it was. Though I could’ve sworn I was getting window closures even when the script wasn’t active at all. But now they haven’t come back since the morning, so I’ll be on the lookout and provide more info as it becomes available.

1 Like
19

Not sure if it is related, but I’m having a similar symptom.
Starting yesterday I think, Cursor now regularly is unusable.
“Cursor Helper (Renderer)” pegs the Mac CPU (all cores) for minutes at a time, making using the machine almost impossible.
Seems to happen frequently when running commands in the terminal.
At the very least it is happening every time I run a tsc build of one of our projects in the terminal.

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image1802×524 51.9 KB

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image1864×690 65.2 KB

I also see many (looks like ~400 from a ps grep of “rg”) of these processes spawned when this happens:

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image1520×662 53.2 KB

Update:
After finding Cursor's ripgrep commands are insanely slow - can I exclude directories? - #3 by tonicastillo, I have fixed it for at least one command by adding the two last entries to this settings.json setting:

  "search.exclude": {
    "**/.git": true,
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "**/*.min.js*": true,
    "**/.angular": true,
    "**/dist": true
  },

Adding the .angular and dist seems to help with some commands, but it still happens on some builds. Really bad UX

This is the result sometimes:

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image460×628 34.7 KB

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