Hi there! Thanks for the clear recording, that Force Quit view showing Cursor climb past 42 GB is exactly what we needed.
This is a known issue we’re actively working on. On macOS it’s usually driven by chat/agent history piling up in Cursor’s internal storage (there’s no automatic cleanup yet), which gets loaded on launch and grows with long agent sessions. Here’s how to get unblocked:
1. Clean up the internal store (biggest lever). In the Command Palette (Cmd+Shift+P), run Developer: Delete Old Chats… (pick an age cutoff), then GC Agent KV Blobs (this compacts the store and reclaims space; on a large store it can lock the window for a minute or two).
2. Check the store’s size, then reset it if needed. In Terminal:
ls -lh ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage/state.vscdb
If that’s several GB or more, it’s very likely the cause. If step 1 doesn’t shrink it enough, do a full reset: quit Cursor with Cmd+Q first, then:
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage
mv state.vscdb state.vscdb.bak
Reopen Cursor and it rebuilds a fresh, small file. Heads-up: this clears your chat/agent history (settings, keybindings, extensions, and projects are kept). Keep the .bak until things look stable, then delete it.
3. Going forward: start a new chat (Cmd+N) for new tasks instead of one very long conversation, and quit with Cmd+Q (not just closing the window) so background processes get cleaned up.
If it’s still climbing after the cleanup, two things will pin down the cause for us:
- During the spike, open Developer: Open Process Explorer (
Cmd+Shift+P), click History (Mem), and send a screenshot so we can see which process is actually growing. - Does it also happen on a brand-new empty folder, or only on this project?
You may also find this thread useful, where we’re tracking the same issue and posting updates: Cursor on macOS consuming massive memory (40GB+)