Excessive battery drain on Mac M4 (recent development)

Support Bug Reports
1

I have been using Cursor for almost a year now and started seeing this issue only recently (in the last few weeks). It seemed to have got even worse since I updated to Mac OS Tahoe 26.2 a few days back. I can see high Memory/ CPU usage but the battery drain is really severe. I am a bit surprised not many are mentioning this in Cursor forum although there is a very long thread in Github: High Battery Drain on Mac · Issue #1703 · cursor/cursor · GitHub. The last post matches my experience. I don’t know which Cursor update this can be traced to since there are so many of them, sometimes daily. I kept hoping the next update will resolve it but no such luck. Wanted to check if anyone else has similar experience.

2

Hey, thanks for the report. I’m seeing similar performance reports on Mac M4 with macOS Tahoe, so this might be tied to that specific hardware + OS combo.

Can we check a few things?

  1. Test without extensions
    Run in Terminal: cursor --disable-extensions
    Does the battery drain still happen?

  2. Process Explorer
    Cmd+Shift+P → “Developer: Open Process Explorer”
    Please take a screenshot when CPU/Memory usage is high, especially for extensionHost and ptyHost.

  3. globalStorage cleanup (often helps performance issues)

    • Fully quit Cursor
    • In Finder press Cmd+Shift+G
    • Go to: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/
    • Rename state.vscdb and state.vscdb.backup to *.old
    • Launch Cursor again

  4. Logs
    Help → Toggle Developer Tools → Console, then copy any errors you see.

Also helpful:

  • Your Cursor version (Help → About Cursor → Copy)
  • Your project/codebase size
  • Which extensions you have installed

Share the results and I’ll take it from there.

3

Hi Dean,

Thanks a lot for reaching out. Surprisingly, I am not seeing the issue since this morning. Nothing changed i.e. no further updates of either Cursor or MacOS (that I am aware of anyway). I do realize I have couple of very long chats but I did not even clean up the storage or start a new chat.

I will keep an eye on this and will let you know.

-Sravasti

1 Like