I have a MacBook M-series with 64GB of RAM, which should be more than enough for any IDE on the planet. Cursor runs so slow it’s painful. Typing lag, autocomplete freezing, the agent crawling. Last week my Mac actually froze and shut itself down while Cursor was open. Thats a first for me in years of using macOS.
I pay over 220 dollars for this and the experience is honestly funny at this point. At what spec does Cursor actually run smooth? Should they put 248GB RAM in the system requirements so we know what we’re signing up for?
I started testing alternatives out of frustration. Zed feels instant. Windsurf is smoother. Even Codex CLI in the terminal beats Cursor on responsiveness. I dont want to switch because i actually like the Cursor workflow but i cant keep working like this.
Is anyone else seeing this on similar hardware? Or is it just me. Would love to know if there’s a fix or if we’re all in the same boat.
Hi! Those RAM numbers for Cursor itself look fine but it does look like you have a lot of workspaces (7?) open at once and each of those workspaces have a bunch of extensions open. I recommend that you go to the Command pallete (Command + Shift + P) and search for “Reload with Extensions Disabled”. See if the slowness continues without the extensions. If it’s resolved, then you’ve identified the issue.
Another thing to check, run uptime in terminal and see if your mac has been on for weeks. Always good to start from a clean slate when you’re trying to identify the problem so it would help to do a fresh restart, close all other programs, and try to minimize the workspaces you’re working in at once.
If this continues, we can take a closer look and it would help if you could disable privacy mode so that we can see some of the details of the request that is causing the slowness.
Regarding workspaces: yes, I had 7 open before, but I’ve now reduced them to 3.
As for a fresh restart, that’s not needed now since Cursor already crashed my session and my Mac was forced to restart.
That said, this doesn’t feel normal. I’ve used PhpStorm with more than 10 workspaces open at the same time, and as you know, PhpStorm is quite heavy with extensions. I never faced issues like this there.
Another red flag is that I’ve seen many other topics reporting similar issues. I believe this is something worth looking into seriously.
I’m open to sharing more details or letting you take a closer look at my setup if that helps.
I use Cursor on an M1 with 16GB RAM. This works ok, most of the time, but it does often leak memory (or at least, keep consuming it) to the point where the system runs out and I have to restart Cursor. I’ve had it use >100GB of (virtual) memory at times.
Same thing here in Windows 11. In the Cursor new Agents Window it lags a lot (same issues as you mentioned).
Happens when loading +2/3 Agents (in the Agents Window)
yes, Cursor gets very slow after some time and memory leaks are still a thing.
Latest version also leads again to regular crashes. I have usually 3 agent windows open that perform tasks and lately its a mess.
I definitely prefer older Mac’s (I don’t like newer ARM), and have 16GB on my mid-2016 running Cursor 2.6.20 (afraid to update, works great). Have 9 Cursor sessions open…but they’re mostly accessing remote systems.
i have a m2 8gb and it can be slow but you can tinker a ton of the issues inside the ide. if using extentions they can cause many slow downs and may need to set things to ignore if ita analyzing tons
also look into how big its cache is. mine was up to 4gb often amd had to clear it.
