Forum Discussion
Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day
Hi everyone, we're pleased to announce Microsoft Teams for Apple Silicon, which on the M1/M2 ARM builds, will have significantly faster performance than what's seen during the Rosetta emulation today! Here's our official roadmap ID for this release; Microsoft 365 Roadmap | Microsoft 365. More on this can be found here; Announcing Microsoft Teams optimized for Apple silicon - Microsoft Tech Community.
Users should see a significant performance boost with this release. And for the Intel Macs out there, we're still thinking about you! We have some large performance fixes coming that will help improve overall performance for the Intel version as well.
Thanks,
Sam Cosby, Teams Engineering PM
MicrosoftHi there shilocase - this is Sam Cosby from Microsoft Teams PM Engineering. I specifically look after performance for the desktop client E2E through feedback. I understand your frustration here, especially if you're having this issue during some of your important meetings. I can assure you that there's significant work going on from our side to review any and all performance related issues from both Mac/Windows/Web areas to ensure improvement. To dig further in your comment, I'll separate out your issues to help you further;
1. Powerful Mac device having issues with Teams: From what it sounds like in your verbatim below, this looks to be more/less affiliated with meetings in Teams. There are some significant improvements going into the current generation of the client, especially on the meetings side. Can you validate this is where you're seeing most of your performance issues on Teams for Mac? Are you seeing performance issues when outside of a meeting? I'd love to hear some additional examples you're seeing to ensure we have the right folks looking into this.
2. "Teams uses memory because of Chromium" - we're actually getting away from this in our next generation client, because we know there are some shortcomings due to this. The timeline is still aways away, but we're all in on this.
I promise we're listening - and we won't delete your message. We want to ensure that what we're delivering is top-grade, so hearing this makes us want to dig in further to give you the best experience possible. Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Best,
Sam
Hi Sam Cosby, thank you for your reply.
I've attached a video of the flickering. This was a month ago and still persists. It seems to be getting worse. But reducing the size of the Teams window so the video feeds are smaller reduces the flicker. I have Xfinity internet which boast 1gb burst speeds and when I've tested it, it always comes around 200MB/second.
The reality of running Teams on this computer is I have to shut down most every app to get it run at a reasonable pace and more often than not reboot after using Teams for my computer to recover. While I run Teams, I have to shut down my Apple apps like Mail, Finder, Calendar because they start to lag too and it causes even more delay in Teams opening and responding to commands.
The performance issues I've experienced are a seriously long lag times 5-20 seconds (easily) throughout the entire use of it. Opening the app takes forever, opening a meeting takes forever to populate the screen that allows me to turn on/off the camera/microphone before joining the meeting takes forever. Upon joining the meeting, that takes forever, bringing up the share options dialog box takes forever, once clicking on the Share button, it takes several clicks for it to respond to the option I selected. Because of the lag, I've lost confidence that when I select an option, the App actually acknowledges it, especially disconnecting, and as a result, buttons get clicked multiple times causing even more delay. Sometimes I have to command Q to leave meetings because "End Meeting" doesn't respond. It's like the button is decorative. These delays accumulate to about 45-60 seconds from the time I open Teams to when I can actually connect into a meeting. Leaving is quick if I just Command Q or Command-option escape and force quit Teams. I have no patience for waiting on the app to figure itself out anymore. However the worst was of all these delays was over three minutes from the time I opened the app to when I actually was joined into the meeting but that was the prior version (June 2021 - I think) to the one I'm running now, Version 1.4.00.16567 on Mac OSX Big Sur 11.6.
Again, when Teams failed me in the meeting yesterday in front of 100 people, before that, I was stoked to see Teams opening up quickly, popped me right in to the meeting. I seriously thought I had fixed this lag issue... by erasing my entire hard drive and reinstalling the OS from scratch with no backup recovery to ensure whatever issue is causing these lags before didn't get transferred over to this fresh OS install. But, the very moment I clicked that share button, everything went FUBAR again and Teams has been running awful since. It's like it has some weird memory leak that tends to compound in some preference file full of errors. I've deleted preference files before and that tended to help some but not a fix.
Hopefully this gives you enough of my experience and attempted resolve to work with?
I have the exact same problem. If I have two meetings in a row, the Teams starts freezing my late model MacBook pro: video flickers, teams becomes unresponsive and the heat fan runs very high. I have to restart my computer pretty much every time after using teams for a session lest my computer comes unresponsive. I do not have any problems with any other software for work except when Teams is involved.
lukasparker Somewhere else, I read that a workaround solution for M1 Macs is to download edge and run Teams in that as a PWA and that it seems fast/stable. I'll be trying that
Sidenote. I have an 8 year old iMac. I am running Teams in Edge web browser and it's working perfectly. Video is not as good but its good enough and doesn't freeze or shutdown my Mac!HeatherA000 lukasparker hello everybody...
I've been doing some extensive testing and on my case this happens when:
I have plugged in USB devices or
I have a secondary monitor connected.
On a meeting with video in progress without any peripheral connected the machine works flawlessly, but at the first second that i plug in any device into the machine starts failing and killing my machine to the point that is impossible to use the machine.
The most performance hits it's when a secondary display is connected trough a usb c dock.
Tried this with three docks and same result.
So.. basically i resorted to when having a call to disconnect everything and after the call is done to plug my peripherals again.
In my non existing software developing skills it seems that it maybe having a secondary screen connected creates a huge memory leak and cpu interrupts while the machine process audio & video from teams.
I am also having the exact same issues on my Mac.
Screen flickering, complete system meltdown and eventually I have to force-quit teams to get things back to normal.
I have reverted to only attending teams meetings in the browser, as this seems to be more stable currently.
- This is my experience as well with my MacBook Air. I have to restart my computer 5 - 6 times a day and I blamed wifi connections, did a system reboot, but the issue is sharing on teams. I cannot work with this. I freeze and or I cannot get in. My phone today would also not work (iphone) to get me into the meeting, so I was essentially shut out. TEAMS is creating WORK STRESS. I ask if we as a company need to move away from it as we have a large creative department that work on MACs or if this will be fixed. I saw above that the solution can be some time away... HOW MUCH TIME?
- Sam CosbyHello everyone - we have a fix for the flickering issue on Mac. I'll update more once it can be rolled out to users.
- Hi Sam Cosby, I have to say Teams started working much better for me with the update that came out end of September. Flickering stopped and opened up faster. I just received an update dated November 2, 2021 and Teams loaded much quicker than the previous version (end of September).
Thank you for these improvements and for listening!
