Has anyone found a solution to stop Cursor from crashing and causing high CPU usage?

Discussion
1

Hey everyone, just wanted to ask if anyone has found a solution to prevent Cursor AI from crashing every other minute and consuming excessive CPU resources. I think these two issues are related and have been around for quite some time, making the development process nearly impossible.

Additionally, the model sometimes hangs for about a minute without responding before I can continue, but I assume this is a non-related problem.

Has anyone come up with a solution or workaround for these issues yet?

2

I managed to alleviate this by making my chat create a HANDOVER.md document outlining all work done to date and any development quirks that the new AI chat should know. And then moving my project folder to another folder and reopening it in Cursor, resetting my chat history completely. I then rebriefed the AI with my handover document and its been speedy with zero crashes since! Hope that helps

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3

Downgrade to 0.45.

0.46 is very slow on my Intel Mac after using it for an hour or more. No, new chats do not solve it.

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I like to stay on the latest version, hoping they’ll improve performance in future updates - wishful thinking, I know! :laughing:
btw that what I have now:


Version: 0.46.11 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.96.2
Commit: ae378be9dc2f5f1a6a1a220c6e25f9f03c8d4e10
Date: 2025-03-07T06:44:15.844Z (3 days ago)
Electron: 32.2.6
Chromium: 128.0.6613.186
Node.js: 20.18.1
V8: 12.8.374.38-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.3.0
5

You’re on a Mac, this is simple to do and doesn’t hurt anything to downgrade. Everything is saved, and everything is still there, except the UI changes. I have to do it every time the app restarts because they don’t give you the option to disable auto-updates.

This repo lists all the versions; grab the 0.45 version, copy it over, and done. I’m using 0.45.15, which was released on 2/20/25.

6

have you tried using the Troubleshooting guide? Many users had extensions that caused crashes, others had huge codefiles that caused it too. It shouldnt use so many resources.

I agree that downgrading to 0.45 makes no sense. it can only be a temporary measure.

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Cursor – Troubleshooting Guide - this is absolutely useless guid!

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Have you tried this solution yet?

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I’ve found the cause. It’s because Cursor, despite creating a new chat, continues to store some data in the SQLite database located at ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage.
These files keep growing over time, heavily impacting Cursor’s performance. The main issue, as I understand it, is that SQLite is single-threaded. Because of this, when one CPU core reaches 100% usage, the interface also starts lagging, as it’s probably running on the same core.

In short, I’ve solved this by periodically deleting files from this directory. However, after restarting, I have to set up Cursor again.

Interestingly, I haven’t noticed this problem as much in version 0.46.11, but it might just be a coincidence.

Overall, this seems like a suboptimal project architecture. I think it’d be better to use something other than SQLite.

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I tried cd ~/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage - but i don’t have it on my mac

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~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/globalStorage

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I hope they have a release soon that addresses this. My app crashes all the time.

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What version are you on?

0.47.3 fixed this issue for me on macOS.

14

You can just put that in chatgpt and it will give you all the commands to do on your mac to also find where the database is, i just deleted the large SQL files and that’s deleted my chat history but that is ok as cursor is now not running at 200% CPU