Remote SSH freezes immediately (terminal + Open Folder hang)

[Jonathon_Byrd]

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Remote SSH session becomes unusable. After connecting to an Ubuntu 6.8.0-1041-azure VM, the integrated terminal is immediately unresponsive and “Open Folder” / file browsing hangs (often before any workspace is opened). Cursor becomes frozen/unresponsive.

Remote logs show the extension host entering a bad state:

anysphere.cursor-mcp and anysphere.cursor-agent-exec take ~8 minutes to activate (490k–504k ms).

anysphere.cursor-retrieval throws NoWorkspaceUriError, fails “Failed to execute git”, and tries to read .git/HEAD with ENOENT when no workspace URI exists.

remoteagent.log then spams RequestStore#acceptReply was called without receiving a matching request and the UI becomes unresponsive.

Also saw ECONNRESET in remoteexthost.log.

Troubleshooting already attempted (no improvement):

Downgraded Cursor to 2.4.x (issue persists).

Disabled “codebase indexing” and deleted the index (issue persists; happens even before selecting a workspace folder).

Disabled extensions: fully disabling breaks remote FS provider (ENOPRO for vscode-remote://…); selective disabling didn’t resolve terminal hang.

Remote reinstall: rm -rf ~/.cursor-server temporarily helps then issue returns.

Verified VM health: plenty of RAM/inodes; not disk full; iostat shows low iowait during repro; Cursor server process has high open-file limit (Max open files 1048576 in /proc//limits).

I’ve had a couple tries where I was able to open directly into a project and use Cursor successfully for a few seconds to a couple minutes.

Steps to Reproduce

I’m not sure triggered this issue, but these steps are all that’s required to reproduce it for me.

Open Cursor and connect to a remote host via Remote SSH (Ubuntu 6.8.0-1041-azure, Azure VM).
After connection, try to open the integrated terminal (or interact with it) and/or use “Open Folder…” to choose a directory.
Observe terminal input does not respond and folder selection / opening hangs; Cursor UI becomes unresponsive.
On the remote, inspect logs under ~/.cursor-server/data/logs// and see errors listed above (mcp/agent-exec long activations, retrieval NoWorkspaceUriError, RequestStore spam).

Expected Behavior

Remote SSH should connect normally; integrated terminal should accept input immediately; “Open Folder…” should respond; background services should not block basic editor functionality.

Operating System

MacOS

Version Information

Version: 2.6.11
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: 8c95649f251a168cc4bb34c89531fae7db4bd990
Date: 2026-03-03T18:57:48.001Z (15 hrs ago)
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Default
Electron: 39.6.0
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.0
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.1.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

[deanrie]

Hey, thanks for the detailed report and for all the troubleshooting you’ve already done.

An activation time of around 8 minutes for cursor-mcp and cursor-agent-exec on the remote host looks suspicious. It seems like the extension host is getting stuck on them, which then blocks everything else.

A few things to try:

• Disable MCP on the remote machine: If you have any MCP servers configured (in .cursor/mcp.json or in Cursor Settings > MCP), try removing them temporarily. The cursor-mcp extension trying to start servers over SSH could cause this kind of “freeze”.
• Connect with extensions disabled, then enable one by one: Start Cursor with cursor --disable-extensions, connect over SSH, then enable extensions one at a time from the Extensions panel. This helps isolate which extension is causing the hang. (I know you said you already tried this. The key difference here is connecting first with everything disabled, then enabling them on the remote side.)
• Check network latency: What’s the round trip time (ping) to the Azure VM? High latency plus “chatty” extensions can cause cascading issues.

Also, can you share the output from Cursor Settings > Network > Run Diagnostics?

Let me know how it goes.