High cpu for long chat

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

high cpu utilization happening when there is a long AI chat window is open. this CPU usage is increasing even further when scrolling on the chat.

my macbook air m4 is burning up due to this. FYI, i’ve started with extensions disabled & watched process monitor all the while.

Steps to Reproduce

open a long conversation.

Expected Behavior

low CPU usage for a simple markdown rendering

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.2.14 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 1685afce45886aa5579025ac7e077fc3d4369c50
Date: 2025-12-11T01:12:35.790Z
Electron: 37.7.0
Chromium: 138.0.7204.251
Node.js: 22.20.0
V8: 13.8.258.32-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.1.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Sonnet Opus 4.5

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

2

Same here, regardless of model selection or extensions, close the long chat tab and the cpu usage will drop immediately.

3

Hey, thanks for the report. Let’s collect diagnostics and try quick fixes.

Needed:

  • CMD+Shift+P → Developer: Open Process Explorer → take a screenshot while scrolling when CPU spikes
  • Help → Toggle Developer Tools → Performance tab → record 10–15s while scrolling the problematic chat, save/take screenshots
  • On the Console tab, take a screenshot of errors

Also please clarify:

  • Roughly how many messages are in the chat, and are there many large code blocks/images
  • Does the load increase only while scrolling or also when idle

Send the screenshots/profiles and I’ll review them and escalate to engineering if needed.

4

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