Whenever my chat gets just 2-3 messages (with terminal being used) or 4-5 messages (without terminal being used) long, the entire IDE starts freezing and lagging. It freezes every 5 secs. As soon as I delete the chat, it starts working normally. What weird is that everything except the IDE works perfectly fine. I can freely use and navigate other application no problem.
It has been very frustrating, I keep losing focus and at times even switch IDEs. Is this a Windows problem? I have seen some posts regarding this from months ago (which is where I found out I had to delete chat to fix it), and it looks like the issue is still not fixed.
Steps to Reproduce
Be on Windows
Send 2-3 messages in agent mode
Expected Behavior
Not freeze or lag.
Operating System
Windows 10/11
Current Cursor Version (Menu ā About Cursor ā Copy)
Hey, this issue is typically related to having a large chat history in your project. To resolve it, try manually deleting most of the history, especially the oldest chats. You can also try renaming or moving the project to quickly clear the history.
I, at any point, only keep one chat. As soon as I need to start a new chat, Iām forced to delete the previous chat anyway because it starts freezing otherwise.
It freezes even without my chat being too long. For example, If I were to start a new project now and ask cursor to do something in two files where it writes like 100 lines of code total and executes a terminal command, my IDE starts freezing. If it doesnāt execute a terminal command, I can do maybe 2 more similar requests before it starts freezing.
hey try a full complete uninstallation of cursor, not just manual, go to the AppData and Local Programs, or if you have an uninstaller to this, there sometimes is some residue data.
use revouninstaller portable to completely delete cursor and install it from ground. the app has a free trial kinda like winrar. Donāt forget to make a system restore point before doing the uninstalation and review what registry entries it will try to delete if any. reboot pc, install cursor, test if issue persists.
Hey, I completely uninstalled Cursor with the Cursor and .cursor files and re-installed it. The issue still persists. In fact, itās gotten a little worse now. It freezes almost every 3-5 secs now.
Did you import any extensions? Itās possible that a process is excessively consuming your CPU/RAM resources. Can you check which processes are being used while Cursor is running?
Start by checking the built-in Activity Monitor, then use Process Explorer in Cursor. Also, try booting in safe mode with the flag: cursor --disable-extensions. The issue might be related to the specifics of the project, have you tried checking this in other projects?
It would be great if you could share the info and screenshots of the processes used.
I recently made a detailed post about this recurring issue and have been trying to find the source through extensive testing and have found that Cursor Chat is in fact the issue. Clearing chat only helps until another few messages are sent. Reinstalling does not fix it, I have tested every single Cursor version to track the bug and have found that from version .48 to the current version as of today v1+ has this issue. Version .47.9 did not have this issue. Something changed with the development of Cursor during that update from .48 and up that involves Cursor Chat and Indexing especially that causes Cursor to be completely unusable.
A solution I have found was to install and use something like Claude Code Chat and bypass Cursor Chat completely which actually worked! Even when using Cursor Chat in āAskā mode it still started to freeze up after only about 3 messages. By not using and bypassing Cursor Chat completely I was able to finally get some work done (until those expensive Claude credits ran out at least).
I will not be using Cursor anymore until this issue is resolved as it has costed me hours upon hours of lost development time.
I did not import any extensions. Tried it, was still facing the same issue so I later installed some of the extensions I needed for the project. And the issue is not project related, itās the same for any project I work on.
I have attached screenshots. You can see the tab shows ānot respondingā and turning white, this happens every 2-3 secs.
This seems to all be related to the saved chat history and the file system usage.
It seems that on Linux systems you can solve the issue by moving the history database from the filesystem to ram, but that option is not available on windows.
If this is true, this means that the whole problem is related to the chat history (I suspect trying to sync the correct historical context for chats, maybe using git?), and since Cursor seemed to work great beforehand, why not just add an option to turn it off? Because saving the whole project context history in RAM also sounds like a bad idea for a lot of situations/setupsā¦
Iām running into the same UI/Lag issue. Sent cursor team a gif of the issue. This problem started with 0.49 for me. @ryuzaki You can try CursorUserSetup-x64-0.48.9.exe and see if that works smoothly for you. For me it works perfect. But like I said, starting 0.49 (even the latest version) is very laggy often for 3 - 5 seconds.
P.S. Disabling extension and deleting cursor folder did not work for me either.
