Very high energy consumption with latest 1.7 update

Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

I have a power meter on my mac. When the agent is running, it spikes from 20w to like 110w and it’s doing nothing but writing code. It hasn’t even executed a terminal command yet. When I switch to a different desktop, the power goes down to 20w again, the moment the cursor window is in view, it spikes to over 100w.

Also, when the agent terminal commands run, they don’t show a live printout of the print statements I have. I have to manually run the command in terminal for me to see the print statements executing.

Steps to Reproduce

Just run the agent to run python code and execute it.

Expected Behavior

With previous versions, 1.6 and prior, it was working very smoothly without random resource spikes.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

Screenshot 2025-09-25 at 10.42.36 AM.png
Screenshot 2025-09-25 at 10.42.36 AM.png4112×2658 590 KB

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.6.45
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: 3ccce8f55d8cca49f6d28b491a844c699b8719a0
Date: 2025-09-22T18:22:38.013Z (2 days ago)
Electron: 34.5.8
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.1
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 25.0.0

For AI issues: which model did you use?

Sonnet 4

For AI issues: add Request ID with privacy disabled

9bd86059-0616-43ed-9803-c4eaf2f4ce29

Additional Information

Notice at the top of the screen I have a watt meter, the moment I ask the agent to “write me a story”, it spikes from 20w to 126w. This throttles my computer and all terminal commands become essentially unusable. The agent just freezes and dies.

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

2

Hey, thanks for the report. That’s a pretty big spike, 20W to 126W is not normal and makes the machine basically unusable.

It looks like a performance regression in 1.7 that spikes CPU/GPU when the agent is active. Please try:

  1. Launch Cursor with hardware acceleration disabled:
    cursor --disable-gpu
  2. Temporarily switch to another model (e.g., GPT‑4 instead of Sonnet) to check if it’s model‑specific
  3. Roll back to 1.6 if you need Cursor urgently while we work on a fix

The terminal output issue is likely related, the agent may be freezing due to the same overload.

More steps:

1 Like
3

I’ll try those out, thank you!