I’m experiencing an out-of-memory (OOM) issue. Every time I launch Cursor, memory and CPU usage keep spiking, and within seconds it becomes fully saturated, causing the system to kill the process.
I’ve read other posts in the forum and tried launching with cursor --disable-extensions, but it didn’t help. I’m really disappointed. I paid for this product, but the experience has been very poor. I think it’s time for me to consider other AI-powered IDEs.
Steps to Reproduce
Every time I launch Cursor, memory and CPU usage keep spiking
Hey, thanks for the report. This is a known class of OOM bugs in Composer. Memory builds up in the renderer process because state keeps accumulating like session history, checkpoint blobs, and tool payloads. On Windows, Electron hits a hard limit around 4 GB and crashes sooner, so it looks like an instant spike on launch. At startup it loads all the saved workspace state. --disable-extensions won’t help because the leak isn’t in extensions. We’re tracking the issue, but I can’t share an exact fix date yet.
What you can do right now to get Cursor working again:
Open an empty or different folder on launch via File > Open Folder. The heavy state is stored per workspace, so a clean workspace shouldn’t spike, and this should let you log in and clean things up.
After you get in, delete old agents and sessions. Make sure to delete, not archive. Archived items still get hydrated.
Watch memory usage: Ctrl+Shift+P > Developer: Open Process Explorer, then check the renderer process. If it climbs toward 8 to 10 GB, restart Cursor before it hits OOM.
For the future, to keep memory from growing: don’t keep one Composer session running too long, start a new agent for each new task, and break big tasks into smaller iterations.
If there’s an update on the fix, I’ll post it here. Let me know if the steps above helped.