Longer sessions -> Slower Agents

Support Bug Reports
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1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Agents get progressively slower as sessions get longer.

Steps to Reproduce

  1. Start one agent.
  2. Give prompts for 10 minutes.
  3. Record screen as reply arrives.
  4. Give prompts for a day.
  5. Record screen as reply arrives
    You’ll notice the agent is at least 2x slower in the 2nd recording. (video attached of an agent I left working overnight)
    And it will get slower and slower with usage.

Expected Behavior

With Claude Code and Codex (Cursor extensions or CLIs), the contents get cycled and the token throughput is practically the same. Cursor agents, however, as session length increases, text shows up slower and slower, looking extremely buggy and feeling sluggish.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Operating System

Windows 10/11

Version Information

Version: 3.4.16 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: f736016b0aa20ba1f99b7eec1dda48579fa4c290
Date: 2026-05-13T16:57:36.546Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26100

Additional Information

Context about “Does this stop you from using Cursor”. I answered “Yes”, and it’s because it makes it feel slow and not enjoyable. Because of this, I’ve switched to using Claude Code / Codex extensions inside Cursor and it’s really a shame because I do love everything else about Cursor.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

8

Thanks for the detailed report and video. This is a confirmed issue - long agent sessions accumulate internal state that progressively slows down text rendering, which is exactly what your recording shows.

Workaround:

  • Start fresh agent sessions periodically. Closing the current chat tab and starting a new one resets the renderer state that causes the slowdown. This is the most effective mitigation right now.

  • Check your state.vscdb file size. Over time, this internal database can grow to several GB and compound the sluggishness. On Windows, check: %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\globalStorage\state.vscdb. Important: back up this file before deleting it — removing it will clear your chat history and workspace state, but it will restore normal performance if it has grown large.

A few other users have reported the same pattern:

Our team is actively working on retention limits and performance improvements for long sessions.