Description After using the cowork feature, Claude Desktop becomes extremely slow - slow startup, UI lag, and slow responses. Performance degrades over time even during a single session. Investigation VM Bundle (10GB) The cowork feature ...

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A bug report reveals that Claude Desktop's Cowork feature creates a 10GB VM bundle (rootfs.img) that is never cleaned up, causing severe performance degradation including high CPU usage (24–55% at idle), heavy swap activity, and slow UI responses. The bundle regenerates quickly after deletion and even grows without the user ever enabling Cowork. A temporary workaround involves manually deleting the vm_bundles, Cache, and Code Cache directories, yielding ~75% performance improvement, but degradation recurs within minutes, suggesting an additional memory leak. Multiple users report the same issue, with some seeing bundles grow to 21GB+.

Cowork feature creates 10GB VM bundle that severely degrades performance · Issue #22543 · anthropics/claude-code