VS Code Constantly Freezing
I’ve been using VS Code for a long time, and it’s usually rock solid. Recently, though, I started working with the Remote-SSH extension to connect to a remote Ubuntu server — a more powerful machine I spun up in the cloud to offload dev workloads from my laptop.
But not long after, I noticed VS Code was frequently freezing, lagging, and even dropping SSH connections. The same thing was happening in Cursor and Windsurf, which makes sense since they’re both VS Code forks under the hood.
Diagnosing the Problem
At first, I assumed the culprit was a flaky network between my laptop and the remote server. But after SSH’ing in and running top, I noticed something else entirely: several node processes were spiking CPU.
That makes sense in hindsight. VS Code uses Node.js to run many of its extensions — things like autocompletion, linting, formatting, and debugging. And each of those extensions can spawn one or more node processes.
Here’s a snapshot of what I saw:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1769144 ubuntu 20 0 75.4g 434172 60288 R 120.3 0.7 2w+3d node
325323 ubuntu 20 0 84.4g 805156 16320 R 106.6 1.2 4w+1d node
558513 ubuntu 20 0 52.7g 875896 56540 R 105.6 1.3 4d+10h node
1216323 ubuntu 20 0 74.4g 1.6g 16512 R 105.6 2.5 2w+2d node
330045 ubuntu 20 0 84.7g 1.0g 16320 R 104.3 1.7 3w+5d node
2527930 ubuntu 20 0 41.4g 247436 50304 S 10.6 0.4 41:52.21 node
2803800 ubuntu 20 0 41.4g 232376 55104 S 9.6 0.4 5:14.43 node
A Simple Fix: Throttle the Node Processes
To prevent VS Code from freezing, I wrote a small shell script that uses cpulimit to restrict each node process to 50% CPU usage.
Here’s the script, you can adjust the CPU_LIMIT variable to set the desired CPU limit according to the number of cores on your machine. I set it to 50% for my 24-core server, which is a good balance between performance and stability.
CPU_LIMIT=50
CHECK_INTERVAL=10
SEEN_PIDS_FILE="/tmp/cpu-limited-node-pids"
# Create the file if it doesn't exist
touch "$SEEN_PIDS_FILE"
while true; do
# Get all currently running node PIDs
for PID in $(pgrep -x node); do
# Skip if this PID is already tracked
if ! grep -q "^$PID$" "$SEEN_PIDS_FILE"; then
echo "Applying cpulimit to PID $PID"
cpulimit -p $PID -l $CPU_LIMIT -b
echo $PID >> "$SEEN_PIDS_FILE"
fi
done
# Clean up the list by removing dead PIDs
TMP_FILE=$(mktemp)
while read PID; do
if ps -p $PID > /dev/null; then
echo $PID >> "$TMP_FILE"
fi
done < "$SEEN_PIDS_FILE"
mv "$TMP_FILE" "$SEEN_PIDS_FILE"
sleep $CHECK_INTERVAL
done
After running the script, CPU usage of node processes was limited to 50%, and the VS Code was no longer freezing.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
330045 ubuntu 20 0 84.4g 770784 16320 T 56.8 1.2 3w+5d node
325323 ubuntu 20 0 84.3g 736824 16320 T 54.8 1.1 4w+1d node
558513 ubuntu 20 0 52.7g 899112 56540 T 51.8 1.4 4d+11h node
1216323 ubuntu 20 0 74.0g 1.2g 16512 R 50.5 1.8 2w+2d node
1769144 ubuntu 20 0 75.3g 349628 60288 T 48.8 0.5 2w+3d node
2527930 ubuntu 20 0 41.4g 259240 50304 S 11.3 0.4 48:04.50 node
2803800 ubuntu 20 0 41.4g 234040 55104 S 2.7 0.4 10:23.41 node
The Result
Since applying this fix, VS Code has been smooth — no more freezing, and the SSH connection is stable. If you’re running into similar issues with high CPU usage in VS Code (or Cursor, or Windsurf), give this a shot. It’s a simple and effective workaround while we wait for upstream performance improvements.