> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.agen.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Your coding assistant pauses for a few seconds, then catches up

> Answers stop for a few seconds and then appear all at once, and the AgenShield dashboard shows an event-loop reading of thousands of milliseconds. What it means, which versions are affected, and what to do.

## What you are seeing

* Your coding assistant (for example Claude Code) stops updating for a few
  seconds — the elapsed-time counter freezes — and then catches up all at
  once, even in a short conversation.
* The AgenShield dashboard's metrics panel shows **Event loop p99** in the
  thousands of milliseconds (for example `3428.8 ms`) instead of a few
  milliseconds.
* The dashboard itself is slow to load right after you open it.

## What it means

The AgenShield background service handles the dashboard, the AgenShield tools
your assistant can call, and the record of what your agents do. On affected
versions it could pause for one to five seconds at a time while it waited for
its own database to become free. During a pause, anything waiting on the
service waits too: the dashboard, and the assistant's calls to the AgenShield
tools.

**Your Mac is not at risk while this happens, and nothing is blocked that
should not be.** Enforcement decisions are made by the security extension,
which does not wait for the background service.

## Affected and fixed versions

| | |
| - | - |
| Affected | `2026.10.4` and earlier |
| Fixed in | a fix is in testing; this page will name the release once it is confirmed |

## What to do

**1. Update AgenShield when the fix is released**

The release notes will say when the fix ships. You can then check with the
dashboard's metrics panel: **Event loop p99** should stay at a few
milliseconds.

**2. Until then, or if it continues, collect diagnostics**

Right after a pause, download the diagnostics bundle from the AgenShield
app's **Support** page and send it to your administrator. Each pause is
recorded with what was running at the time, so a single bundle shows the
cause. See [Collecting diagnostics](https://docs.agen.co/troubleshoot/collecting-diagnostics.md).

## Not the cause

* **Opening a new terminal slowly** is usually the shell's own startup files
  (version managers such as `nvm` take most of a second on their own). Time
  `zsh -i -c exit` against `zsh -f -c exit` to see how much is the shell
  configuration.
* **A "Background Items Added" notification for another vendor's updater** is
  unrelated — see
  [Background Items notification](https://docs.agen.co/troubleshoot/background-items-notification.md).


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