Blog Post

Microsoft Teams Blog
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Performance enhancements to Microsoft Teams lead to faster response times

Mark_Longton's avatar
Mark_Longton
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 02, 2022

Over the past year we’ve delivered enhancements to Teams that improve its overall interaction responsiveness time and creates a more fluid experience for the user. Investments have included transitioning from Angular framework to React, upgrading Electron (a framework for building desktop applications), reducing re-rendering, and making incremental improvements to the code. Our desktop, framework, and performance teams made several foundational improvements and our messaging and calling/meeting teams partnered to optimize the code for targeted user experiences we identified as important to the overall experience.


To gauge our progress, we recently looked at anonymized data from the 95th percentile of all desktop users in the world (meaning that 95 percent of the time the experience is better than this metric). We tend to focus on the 95th percentile because it includes users on low end devices, users on low bandwidth networks, and incorporate other edge cases that can impact the user experience.

 

The data showed notable improvements in messaging and meeting experiences as seen today vs. August 2021.

 

Improvements in latency and page load times for messaging

When users scroll over the chat list, latency has improved by 11.4%, and scrolling over the channel list has improved by 12.1%.


The compose message box loads 63% faster, enabling the user to type a message immediately once they switch into a chat or channel.


Page load times are much shorter as well:

  • The time to switch to a channel and to open a chat window-both were dramatically improved by 25%
  • Switching threads in the activity feed has improved by 17.4%
  • Switching between chat threads has improved by 3.1%


Greater fluidity and reduced lag in meetings

The mute and unmute audio response during a call improved by 16%.


Navigating to the ‘Pre-meeting join’ screen is 9% faster.


Opening a calling/meeting window loaded 4.5% faster. Then once a user is in a meeting switching into a chat improved by 13%, switching to the activity feed improved by 18.7%, and switching to a channel improved by 20%.

 

 

These improvements complement the power reduction improvements shared in the recent blog "Microsoft Teams performance improvements reduce power consumption in meetings by up to 50%."


We continue to focus and invest in Microsoft Teams performance optimization and value the customer and partner feedback that helps us to prioritize the most critical scenarios.

Updated Jun 07, 2022
Version 2.0

16 Comments

  • The metrics shared are based on the 95th percentile metrics on desktop devices.  Many of the approvements made will apply to web as well.  

     

    This specific blog is referring to the business version of Microsoft Teams.  The version integrated in Windows 11 is what you can use with your MSA account.  We have more improvements coming for the business version including larger architecture improvements although I am not able to share the timeline at this time.  

  • ngath's avatar
    ngath
    Iron Contributor

    You will never improve performance enough to make everyone happy since you are using web technology instead of native. Also with such a big audience it will be very difficultly to make everyone happy overall with the client.

     

    Would be cool if you ever decided to support an open protocol like https://matrix.org/ then there could be many more clients for many platforms at no extra cost to you (besides adding support). While at the same time giving everyone the possibility to find the client that suits them the most (or even building their own). Matrix also adds the possibility of more collaboration with external users that do not use Teams.

  • ediflyer's avatar
    ediflyer
    Brass Contributor

    Interesting to read, however which version of the app does this blog refer to? I just got a new laptop with Windows 11 but when I went to sign into Teams (having been impressed at first to see it built in to the OS), I was told this wouldn't work for my organisation account and I would have to download Teams for Work/Organisations. I duly did so, but it didn't seem that power efficient or snappy so I'm wondering if it's an older version that doesn't have the changes you're discussing here. Do you know when these different versions are going to be merged? It's all a bit confusing. 

  • Aphonicnoise's avatar
    Aphonicnoise
    Brass Contributor

    Is this based on windows devices, web, mobile or Mac? 

    crossing them seems a bit disingenuous in some cases, many mac users would love to see this breakdown on Mac, which would not appear to share these improvements anecdotally. 

  • Philipp_Kohn Thank you for the comment.  I can say that there is a heavy resource allocation towards the WebView2 work you mention for business users Philipp_Kohn although I am not able to comment on any timeline at this time.   Fully appreciate the need to keep pushing hard in this area across responsiveness, latency, and resource utilization both with short team gains and longer term architectural changes to achieve step function improvements.  Thanks again.

  • Philipp_Kohn's avatar
    Philipp_Kohn
    Brass Contributor

    Hi Mark_Longton,

    thx for the effort, spirit, and work that you and your colleagues are bringing into the Teams development process. This is greatly appreciated from the community :stareyes:

     

    Are there any life signs of the new WebView2 based Microsoft Teams Client for Business Users? We're hoping that with this new client the responsiveness, performance and UX is, what we're praying for :hearteyes:

     

    A TeamsFanBoy from Germany

    Philipp_Kohn