How I Fixed My Cursor IDE Freeze After the Version 1.0 Update

I recently updated my Cursor IDE to version 1.0 and immediately faced a frustrating issue: the window would freeze and become completely unresponsive, especially on specific projects. It halted my coding workflow, and after some digging, I found solutions that actually worked.

The Core Problem I Encountered

After the update, Cursor started freezing intermittently—sometimes it wouldn’t respond to clicks or keystrokes for minutes. This happened only on certain codebases, making it impossible to work efficiently. I tried reinstalling Cursor and clicking “keep waiting,” but nothing helped until I pinpointed the root cause.

What Was Causing the Freeze

I discovered that large chat histories were the main culprit. Cursor has a 100MB storage limit for chat history, and exceeding this can bog down the UI thread, leading to unresponsiveness. In severe cases, it even caused system-wide slowdowns due to file deadlocks in the state.vscdb file.

Solutions That Worked for Me

Here’s the step-by-step approach I used to resolve the issue:

• Delete Unnecessary Chat History: I manually cleared old chats to stay under the 100MB limit. Navigate to these paths and delete the oldest folders:
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Cursor\User\workspaceStorage
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage
  • Linux: ~/.config/Cursor/User/workspaceStorage

  For important chats, I exported them using the SpecStory extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

• Move the State File to RAM with a Script: To handle persistent freezes, I created a bash script that moves state.vscdb to a RAM-based directory. This prevents disk I/O issues. Here’s the script I used:#!/bin/bash
  # Source and destination paths
  BACKUP_DIR="$HOME/.config/Cursor/User/globalStorage"
  SOURCE_FILE="${BACKUP_DIR}/state.vscdb"
  TEMP_DIR="/tmp/cursor_state"
  TEMP_FILE="$TEMP_DIR/state.vscdb"
  BACKUP_FILE="$BACKUP_DIR/state.vscdb_backup"

  # Function to create backup
  create_backup() {
  mkdir -p "$BACKUP_DIR"
  cp "$TEMP_FILE" "$BACKUP_FILE"
  echo "Backup created: $BACKUP_FILE"
  }

  mkdir -p "$TEMP_DIR"
  if [ -f "$BACKUP_FILE" ]; then
  cp "$BACKUP_FILE" "$TEMP_FILE"
  else
  if [ ! -f "$SOURCE_FILE" ]; then
  echo "Error: File not found"
  exit 1
  fi
  cp "$SOURCE_FILE" "$TEMP_FILE"
  fi
  rm -f "$SOURCE_FILE"
  ln -s "$TEMP_FILE" "$SOURCE_FILE"
  echo "Symlink created"

  # Run backup loop in background
while true; do
create_backup
sleep 600
done &Run this script at startup to keep state.vscdb in RAM.

Preventing Future Issues

To avoid recurrences, I now proactively manage my chat history:

• Regularly delete old or unused chats every few days using the file paths above.
• Use the SpecStory extension to export and archive important conversations.
• Monitor chat size and keep it under 100MB—I aim to start new chats for different code sections to limit accumulation.

My takeaway: While these fixes got Cursor running smoothly, the best long-term solution would be for the IDE to process chat history in background threads, ensuring the UI never blocks. For now, these steps have saved my workflow!