Cursor Memory Leak on Mac OS

[jejansse]

Describe the Bug

When opening a new Cursor window a node process is spawned that quickly grows to multiple gigabytes of memory. If I force quite this process Cursor keeps running w/o any issues and it does not happen again. But it is still annoying nevertheless.

I checked the process explorer in Cursor while it was happening, but the process with the highest memory usage in the process explorer only consumes 200MB. So this node process does not appear to be shown there.

Steps to Reproduce

Open Cursor on Mac OS. Wait a bit (not long). A node process spawned by Cursor keeps growing to multiple gigabytes of memory.

Expected Behavior

This node process should not consume that much memory.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.1.6 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: 5b19bac7a947f54e4caa3eb7e4c5fbf832389850
Date: 2025-06-25T02:16:57.571Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.5.0

Additional Information

MacBook Pro
14-inch, 2021
Apple M1 Pro
32 GB
macOS Sequioa 15.5

Extensions
simonsiefke.svg-preview 2.8.3
yoshinorin.current-file-path 4.1.0
yoavbls.pretty-ts-errors 0.6.1
k–kato.intellij-idea-keybindings 1.7.4
ms-playwright.playwright 1.1.14
unifiedjs.vscode-mdx 1.8.14
bierner.markdown-mermaid 1.28.0
ms-python.isort 2025.0.0
ms-python.black-formatter 2025.2.0
ms-python.python 2025.6.1
ms-python.debugpy 2025.8.0
anysphere.cursorpyright 1.0.3
prisma.prisma 6.10.1
bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss 0.14.23
tlaplus.vscode-ide 2025.6.251726

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Sometimes - I can sometimes use Cursor

[jejansse]

It occurred again and I tried to dig a bit deeper.

After force killing the node process this is what the process explorer looks like:

So it’s the playwright plugin that’s apparently misbehaving in Cursor.

[danperks]

Hey, thanks for digging into this, certain extensions are known to perform poorly and can have knock-on effects to the performance and memory usage of Cursor on your machine.

My usual recommendation would be to check our troubleshooting guide to find the bad extension, but as you have already done so, I’d potentially suggest reporting this directly to Playwright to see if they can either identify the cause or push a fix!

Our troubleshooting doc for reference:

Cursor – Common Issues