Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day

[shilocase]

I have a hard time believing I'm the first person to post this after not finding anything in the forum.  I wouldn't doubt if Microsoft is deleting them because they can't figure out how to fix this issue.  I can Google this issue and come up with numerous results but NOTHING has been able to fix this issue except for completely removing Teams all together, which unfortunately is not an option for me.

Teams is murdering my MacBook Pro 16" i9 with 16GB RAM every day.  This was supposed to be the most kick-a$$ laptop at the time but Microsoft is slowly killing it with Teams.  It causes serious lags and randomly decides when it wants to share the screen successfully.  Other times, it just shows screen but no audio or vice versa. It's infuriating and I've lost my patience!

For context, I just re-installed my entire OS thinking it was an OS issue. I erased the entire drive and started from scratch.  I did not do any kind of restore from backup.  Everything was a fresh install yesterday.

I joined a teams meeting today in front of 100 people and Teams seemed to be running fine until I went to share screen and then everything choked. Those who were showing video on the call started flickering rapidly, which could have caused an epileptic seizure - it's that bad and I'm not joking, this isn't funny. IT'S VERY IRRITATING! My entire system.  Mail, Calendar, Finder, and Preview (all Apple Apps, which should run super fast) started running like garbage with lags between 5 and 10 seconds - that's no joke.  Upon reboot, it was normal again until I ran Teams for another meeting... reboot.

I firmly believe Teams is a virus and the developers should be fired for ignoring this issue.  I've been dealing with this issue for nearly a year.  Teams always causes some kind of lag issue whenever I run it.  I have to reboot my machine to get my computer to work somewhat normal again.  This is ridiculous!

I found an MS article mentioning how Teams uses memory because of this Chromium feature due to easier development.  I don't care about the ease of development.  I CARE about it working and NOT DELAYING MY PRODUCTIVITY.   Forget Chromium!

Earlier this year, MS announced they were going to have a new and improved version in April 2021.  I think two version have been released since then - None of them have solved this issue.

Is anyone at Microsoft Listening?!?!?!

[#2]

@shilocase : I am a community manager for Microsoft Teams. Your post has been forwarded to the team and someone should reach out to you. I've updated the title of your post to stay within our community guidelines. 

[#3]

Thank you @JohnSteckroth for your response. I'm looking forward to speaking to someone on the Teams team.

[#4]

Hi 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

[#5]

@Sam Cosby 

I having the same issue on my Mac and it seems to have become much worse recently.  The teams client will freeze when I'm in a meeting, especially when I'm sharing a screen.  I'm running MacOS Big Sur, 11.5.2 and the latest version of MS Teams 1.4.00.22368.

[#6]

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?

[#7]

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.

[#8]

Hello everyone - we have a fix for the flickering issue on Mac. I'll update more once it can be rolled out to users.

[#9]

Using 1.4GHz Dual Core i5, iMac 21.5-Inch from Mid 2014. It is exceedingly unoptimized for MacOS and for my iMac to be able to function with teams in a way that is productive at all is impossible. It causes aggravation while I have a secondary monitor plugged in and it is absolutely killing my machine's productivity even when minimized. It is affecting co-worker image of Apple hardware despite the issue being a slow intel 1.4 processor with a very Chatty app on the Microsoft end, Please don't let people end up getting frustrated.. With ignorance around MacOS use in general things tend to get ugly pretty fast in the workplace. for years things like this have plagued cross platform software with the blame being cast across both Aisles.

Opening FS Usage, reveals when Teams is opened, Application "Microsoft Teams" HAMMERS my SSD, and File System with an obnoxious level of I/O requests, the saturation caused by excessive reads, and writes is just as saturating the the internal Bus as having a key being held down throughout your entire workflow somewhere on the keyboard... THIS IS LOOKING SIMILAR TO EARLY ADOBE CC ISSUES THAT CAUSED CRASHES, and EVEN GPU DAMAGE THAT EXACERBATED THERMAL ASPERITIES IN DRIVES AND DISRUPTED BGA VOIDS PRESENT IN GPUs. You guys have successfully built a bomb into your program for the MacOS Users to be angry about.

Please note: it's absolutely obvious to everyone that it is the 'Teams Client. Despite some systems poor attributes. I just Instammed an M2 Drive and if that is causing me trouble with one of those installed, then anyone with a mechanical drive is really dead in the water until Vast Optimizations are routed.

Devs be wary, this is a major issue because of the contention between apple and Microsoft over SW. Final Cut may or may not run smoothly on other systems but both companies have a duty to help each other look good when using respective software cross platform... As end users we are very fickle, we cant be just left to attribute this issue to platform hardware or have others outside the engineering departments put in their two sense.. This may divide Cross-platform OS end users due to lack of interest and cause a PR issue for Microsoft. But the diehards are just waiting for Microsoft to get along with Apple (Vice Versa)

[#10]

@Sam Cosby Same here. This is REALLY painful. Especially those days when you can spend up to 8 hours in videoconference in a row. Please share any improvement fix asap 🙂

[#11]

Same here.

I am a frontend developer, node tools like "Jest", "Eslint" etc. have runtimes of sometimes over 10 minutes(!) instead of 60 seconds.

During a team call it is impossible for me to work.
MacBook Pro 16" with 32GB Ram - that's not allowed @Microsoft & @Sam Cosby !

I am massively disappointed by Microsoft. Not even an ETA for Teams 2.0 was communicated.

In Debug /Verbose mode I can watch the scripts running - it's hilarious.

[#12]

I’ve had the same peformsce occur on my MacBook Pro. I’ve seen other users posting about this for the past two years. Apparently the issue doesn’t exist on the new M1 chips, just the Intel ones.

Every other app works beautifully, but it’s been a disaster as during COVID almost exclusively work off teams and it clogs up resources across my entire laptop.

[#13]

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!

[#14]

That's fantastic to hear. We're continuing to double down our performance investments in both the Mac & Windows apps and you should continue to see significant improvements as we progress forward. Timelines are a bit challenging to project but I've spoken to the team about some of the issues brought up here and can confirm that we're working as fast as possible to continue to give you the best possible experience on the product.

Thanks again for letting us know and we're always listening!
Sam

[#15]

@Sam Cosby 

Is there an updated release version since  1.4.00.22368?  Someone referenced a November release version, but I cannot find any details about a newer version for Mac since the September release.  Any news about a beta or other version to try?

Thanks,
Richard

[#16]

1.4.00.22368 is the current stable release for Mac but there's a rollout for 1.4.00.29477 that's ongoing right now. It's at 50% propagation so it should roll out sooner rather than later.

[#17]

@shilocase 

Just wanted to say that I look after a fleet of about 150 Macs. We use Teams all day every day. For those fortunate to have M1 Macs, I hear no grumbles. From nearly every intel user I have constant complaints from the fan being on all the time, to the Mac being completely unusable whilst using Teams and especially when on calls. Unfortunately for us we have had to upgrade quite a lot of people just so they can work. I was disappointed when an update earlier in the year promised performance increases but I haven't seen them.

[#18]

Just wanted to confirm the observation by @robbo215 that upgrading from a 2020 MacAir to a 2021 M1 MacBook Pro seems to solve Teams issues.  I upgraded in desperation due to the unusable performance of the Mac Air whenever Teams was running especially when sharing and editing an Excel spreadsheet in large meetings.  Since upgrading to the M1 (16GB memory) MacBook Pro, Teams has run smoothly even with multiple other app all running simultaneously.  I note that all of the Microsoft Office suite that my company uses (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, Onenote, ToDo, etc) is now optimised for the native M1 chip except Onedrive (which is promised to happen soon) and Teams (which no timeframe for M1 has yet been released).   

[#19]

@shilocase 

Thank you for bringing this up. Just to keep this topic from disappearing I'd like to share my experiences with this since I switched from a whacky old windows PC with Windows 8 to a 5k iMac - 32GB / 4.2QC i7, Radeon 580 8GB on both Big Sur and now Monterey. 

It was running perfect on that old PC and it's really blocking the iMac. 

I must say though that it mostly shows in Teams itself. In a Meeting if want to unmute or mute myself i need to press that button about 10 seconds before i need the mic muted or unmuted. about 15 seconds if it's a screen sharing. Oh and don't forget the 10-15 seconds of complete freezing after finishing a call or a meeting. 

Also: if there is a short teams call (no meeting) it's mostly even over before it can fully show up on the screen - and the call window will need 10-15 seconds do disappear after hanging up - which also results in a full freeze of the teams app. 

That extreme lag/slowing down used to be a problem which also showed after a "teams notification" came up. That luckily could be solved by changing the style of the notifications from "MS Teams style" to "os style". 

But: I can't believe how long microsoft has not been able to solve this issue. I have restarted, reinstalled, updates, etc. Teams and my Mac so many times it's just frustrating. Unfortunately - and that is probably why microsoft takes their time - i rely on it and have no way of switching to something else. Otherwise I'd have kicked this software off my mac so quick it would've not even realized it (because it's so slow..)

[#20]

Fully agreed! I searched high and low. We use this for our group meetings and sometimes classes but my laptop overheats. I can HEAR the fans spinning a mile a minute especially if it’s flat on my desk things start sticking and having issues loading. My battery barely lasts when I’m on teams and plugging in AFTER teams is on leaves my laptop either discharging or at a standstill with the plug sign instead of the lightening bolt for charging

Teams is a solid app in terms of capabilities but the number it does on processing is ridiculous. Microsoft needs to do better.