Windsurf Memory Gets Out of Control - Here's How to Fix It

Windsurf basically keeps getting hungrier the longer you use it. Started out around 500MB when I first fire it up, but give it a few hours and it's chomping through 3-4GB like it's nothing.

Here's what I've figured out from actually using this thing:

The Real Memory Problem

Windsurf's Cascade feature is pretty smart - it remembers stuff about your project and keeps context from your conversations. But "remembering" means storing that shit in memory, and it never seems to forget anything.

The memory usage breakdown on my 2023 MacBook Pro looks like this:

• Fresh startup: ~500MB (version 1.0.7, not terrible)
• After 2 hours of work: 1.5-2GB (getting heavy, fans start up)
• End of day session: 3-4GB (everything else starts swapping to disk)

The stuff that really kills performance:

• Big codebases make the indexing go nuts
• Every Cascade conversation adds to the memory pile
• Multiple projects open? Forget about it
• Working on a React app with `node_modules`? Good luck

What Actually Works to Fix This

1. Just Restart the Damn Thing

Sounds dumb as hell, but restarting Windsurf every 3-4 hours is the only real fix. Yeah, you lose your conversation history, but your machine stops dying.

Found this out the hard way when Windsurf hit 6GB during a deadline push and took down my Docker containers because the system ran out of memory. Lost 20 minutes of work because I forgot to save. Now I restart religiously - lunch break and end of day, minimum.

2. Make Windsurf Ignore the Junk

Create a `.codeiumignore` file in your project root and tell it to skip the bloat:

node_modules/
dist/
build/
.next/
coverage/
*.log
public/uploads/

This alone cut my memory usage by like 30%. All that generated crap doesn't need AI analysis.

3. Close Projects You're Not Using

Windsurf keeps indexing stuff even when you're not actively working on it. I learned to close projects instead of just switching between them. Memory usage drops immediately.

4. Monitor Your RAM Usage

On Mac, I just keep Activity Monitor open on the side. When Windsurf hits 3GB+, that's my cue to restart it before things get ugly.

On Windows: Task Manager works fine. Linux folks probably already know this stuff.

Working with Large Codebases

If you're working on anything bigger than a typical side project, Windsurf's default behavior will murder your machine. I found this out on a 300k line Rails app where Windsurf spent 45 minutes indexing on startup and used 8GB of RAM before I could even write a line of code.

For big codebases:

• Be super aggressive with `.codeiumignore`
• Focus Cascade on one feature at a time instead of the whole codebase
• Use specific file mentions (@filename) instead of letting it crawl everything
• Consider breaking your work into smaller, focused sessions

When Teams Use It

The memory problem gets way worse with team setups. Everyone's indexing, everyone's context is mixing together, and suddenly Windsurf is using 6-8GB.

Team survival tips:

• Coordinate who's using the heavy AI features when
• Set up dedicated dev machines with more RAM if you can swing it
• Consider using it in smaller, focused sessions rather than all-day marathon coding

Network Performance Issues

Corporate networks will absolutely wreck Windsurf's performance. The AI responses that normally take 2-3 seconds start taking 15-20 seconds or just hanging forever.

Spent a whole morning thinking Windsurf was broken until I realized our IT department had blocked the Codeium API endpoints. The error messages were useless - just said "network error" instead of "your IT team hates AI."

Corporate network fixes:

• Ask your IT to whitelist *.windsurf.com and *.codeium.com
• If you're behind a proxy, Windsurf's settings need to know about it
• Sometimes VPN routing screws things up - try connecting directly if possible

The Bottom Line

Windsurf is genuinely useful when it works, but it's not optimized for long coding sessions. The memory leaks are real, and there's no magic setting that completely fixes it.

My workflow now:

1. Start Windsurf
2. Work for 3-4 hours max
3. Restart it during breaks
4. Keep .codeiumignore files in every project
5. Close unused projects aggressively

It's annoying, but until they fix the underlying memory issues, this is what actually keeps it usable. Way better than fighting with a 6GB editor that's crawling along.

I've been using Windsurf long enough to figure out some less obvious ways to keep it from destroying your machine. Here's the stuff that actually makes a difference:

The Nuclear Option: Process Limiting

On macOS/Linux, you can actually limit Windsurf's memory usage at the OS level. This broke in version 1.0.8 but works again in 1.0.12+:

## Limit Windsurf to 4GB max
[ulimit](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/The-Set-Builtin.html) -v 4194304  # 4GB in KB
windsurf

When it hits the limit, it'll crash instead of eating all your RAM. Crude but effective. Better than your whole system locking up, which happened to me twice last month.

Smarter .codeiumignore Setup

Most people just throw the obvious stuff in there, but here's what really matters:

## The basics everyone knows
node_modules/
dist/
build/

## The stuff that actually kills performance
**/.git/
**/coverage/
**/*.min.js
**/*.bundle.js
**/*.map
**/docs/api/
**/test-results/
**/__pycache__/

The `.git` directory is especially brutal on large repos. Windsurf tries to index all that history and it's completely useless.

Project Workspace Tricks

Instead of opening your entire monorepo, create separate workspaces for different sections:

my-big-project/
├── frontend.code-workspace
├── backend.code-workspace
├── shared.code-workspace

Each workspace file only includes the relevant folders. Memory usage drops by 60-70% compared to opening the whole thing.

Dealing with Corporate Networks

If you're stuck behind a corporate proxy, Windsurf's network requests will crawl or timeout completely. Here's what actually works:

Option 1: Proxy configuration

[export](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Environment.html) HTTP_PROXY=http://your-proxy:8080
export HTTPS_PROXY=http://your-proxy:8080
export NO_PROXY=localhost,127.0.0.1,.internal.company.com

Option 2: Use your own API keys
Skip Windsurf's servers entirely and use your own OpenAI/Anthropic keys. Way faster and more reliable on corporate networks. Just don't use the old OpenAI API v1 format - Windsurf expects v1.1+ (learned this when spending 3 hours debugging why my API calls were getting 400 errors).

Container Performance Tricks

If you're running Windsurf in Docker or dev containers, the default resource limits will kill you:

## In your devcontainer.json or docker-compose.yml
services:
  windsurf:
    mem_limit: 6g  # More than the default 2g
    shm_size: 1g   # Prevents crashes on large files
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp:noexec,nosuid,size=1g

The tmpfs mount helps with all the temporary files Windsurf creates during indexing.

Multi-Project Management

Working on multiple projects? Don't keep them all open. I use this simple rotation:

1. Active project: Windsurf with full features
2. Reference projects: VS Code or text editor only
3. Switch every 2-3 hours or when switching focus

Sounds like extra work, but it's faster than fighting with a 6GB editor that's crawling.

Performance Monitoring Script

I wrote a simple script that alerts me when Windsurf gets out of hand:

#!/bin/bash
while true; do
  memory=$(ps -o rss= -p $(pgrep Windsurf) | awk '{sum+=$1} END {print sum/1024}')
  if (( $(echo \"$memory > 3000\" | bc -l) )); then
    osascript -e 'display notification \"Windsurf using '$memory'MB - time to restart?\" with title \"Memory Alert\"'
  fi
  sleep 300  # Check every 5 minutes
done

Saves me from the "why is my machine so slow" debugging session.

When All Else Fails

Sometimes Windsurf just gets into a bad state where nothing helps. The process won't die cleanly, memory doesn't free up, or it keeps crashing on startup.

Force kill everything:

## macOS/Linux
pkill -f windsurf
killall -9 \"Windsurf\"

## Windows
taskkill /f /im windsurf.exe

Clear the cache:

rm -rf ~/.windsurf/cache/
rm -rf ~/.windsurf/logs/

Start fresh with a clean config:

mv ~/.windsurf/config.json ~/.windsurf/config.json.backup

This fixes like 90% of the weird performance issues I run into. Had to do this last week when Windsurf started indexing for 20 minutes every time I opened a project. Turned out the cache was corrupted and it kept trying to rebuild the same broken index over and over.

The Bottom Line

Windsurf has real performance issues that probably won't get fixed anytime soon. The memory leaks, the bloated indexing, the network timeouts - they're all real problems.

But if you work around them instead of fighting them, it's still the best AI code editor I've used. Just don't expect it to work like a normal editor. Plan for restarts, monitor your memory, and keep your projects focused.

The AI features are genuinely helpful when they work. Just be ready to babysit the performance side of things.