How to resolve the issue that Cursor prompts that the context exceeds the 50M limit?

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1

Cursor suddently in one project workspace display the context over 50M ? I try reboot , add .cursorignore, clear cache, still not work

but it’s work well in other project workspace

How to resolve the issue Thank you.

3

Hey, a few clarifying questions:

  1. Can you share a screenshot of the error context exceeds the 50M limit?
  2. Roughly how big is the project folder? Does it include DB dumps, logs, binaries, or generated folders?
  3. Can you paste your .cursorignore or .cursorindexingignore if you have them?
  4. Do you have a .gitignore in the project? Cursor automatically respects it during indexing.

In the meantime, here are a few steps to debug:

  1. Find large folders and files

On Mac or Linux, from the project root:

du -sh *

On Windows:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -File | Sort-Object Length -Descending | Select-Object -First 100 FullName,Length
  1. Add large unnecessary directories to .cursorindexingignore

Important note: Cursor has two files:

  • .cursorignore excludes files from both indexing and all AI features like autocomplete and chat
  • .cursorindexingignore excludes only from indexing, AI features still work

To fix the 50M limit issue, you usually want .cursorindexingignore.

The file must be in the project root. Example contents:

*.log
*.sql
*.db
node_modules/
.next/
dist/
build/
vendor/
__pycache__/
*.bin
data/

Cursor automatically skips files larger than 1 MB, but thousands of small files like node_modules can still add up and exceed the 50M limit.

  1. Reindex the project

After updating the file, open Cmd+Shift+J on Mac or Ctrl+Shift+J on Windows, then go to Indexing & Docs and start reindexing.

Let me know what you find from du -sh *, it usually makes the culprit obvious.