Forum Discussion
Teams is KILLING my Mac Every Day
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?!?!?!
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
- Sam Cosby
Microsoft
Hi everyone - we should hopefully have some news for you by next week that you'll want to hear about Teams on Mac & Mac Performance. We absolutely hear you and care very deeply and are working to make the best and most performant version of Teams on Mac possible. Stay tuned.Sam Cosby well that’s exciting. But I think I speak for
most mac users when I say, we hope it’s significant on both apple silicon and intel. Looking forward to further info.
Sam Cosby do you have an update at all? I joined a call today on a 2017 Macbook Pro, screen sharing with webcam on. I was using a 1080p external monitor with my Macbook open.
Fans span up extremely loudly, machine slowed to a halt and then the attendees on the call started talking over me saying "has he frozen?".
I had to turn off webcam and turn off incoming video to be in with a chance of my Macbook not being completely unusable and the attendees being able to see the content and hear me.
Many thanks!
- Did I miss the announcement?
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.
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).
- have same problem with my Mac air 2020 intel chip which keeps crashing in middle of presentations - just checking on this forum that its worth buying a Mac Pro with a non-intel chip?
I use my personal MacBook Air (2019, 1.6 GHz dual-core i5, 16 GB) in a Teams-heavy environment (office 365, etc). I am having MAJOR performance issues with the Teams client (especially sharing content while driving an external monitor). I'm looking at buying a MBP (14" 2021 M1 10/24 32GB/2TB) basically for the sole reason of unacceptable performance issues with MS Teams client. Based on your support experience, how confident should I be that the M1 MBP will overcome the (current) Teams client issues? Thanks for any advice you'd like to share. robbo215
- Sam Cosby
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
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 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.
Sam Cosby - Hi Sam - Has this issue been addressed in some way yet? This issue drives me nuts (like everyone else posting here). The video quality stutters (audio + video lag/jumpiness). I am on a 16" Macbook Pro, and have a gig fios ethernet connection, There should be no lag.
Shifting to a web/browser version of teams is not ideal as it kills a lot of features - need a better behaving Teams client for mac.
Please advise on anything to improve this, or path to improved version of teams client timing.
Thanks!
JCI just want to put in that teams is also killing my mac. I have been using a mac and I have two computers connected to one screen, so to share the screen I remote in to one of the computers. When running teams and someone starts sharing their screen performance grinds to a halt. The system becomes unusable until the meeting ends.
- Infuriating. Adding to this issue as it happens to me regularly after video conferencing in teams. 2019 2.6Ghz 6-core intel core i7 w/ 16GB 2667MHz DDR4 memory.
The computer is great for everything else I'm doing, dare I say even fairly powerful for most of the analyses I'm running. But Teams crashes it almost everytime and I have to reboot the computer to have a functional working environment again.
This makes me HATE teams and Microsoft more than I already did, unfortunately the company I work for necessitates Teams communication. All other video conferencing apps work fine, but this terribly coded Microsoft Teams app is a computer breaker.
Sure seems like the Microsoft devs are doing this on purpose to make people think their Apple laptops are the problem.- I have just changed from Windows laptops to a MacBook Pro and seem to be the only one at the company that has this problem. Teams has been fast at the beginning but after a few days it is unusable.
UI actions take several seconds to complete, text input is delayed and the startup takes long.
Microsoft Teams Render Helper processes take up more than 100% of CPU power at times and thus the rest of the system slows down as well.
The only workaround this far is the Teams web version in Chrome.- Make sure you exit Teams after eery session and restart the mac daily.
- I am in a very similar situation as you with the same Mac model (2019 - should work right?). Looks like Microsoft doesn't care.
- Probably not the answer you wanted, but after referring IT to this thread, they decided to upgrade me to a 2021 MBP (Apple M1 Pro) rather than troubleshoot my 2019 MBP (Intel based).
This seems to have solved my problem.
shilocase I know for a fact that the Macbook with Core i9 does not have enough cooling and it can be slower than the i7 version. That model is just a waste of money. I had issues with pretty much anything that consumed more RAM than expected (Docker, Chrome, Teams...).
That being said, Teams is just garbage. It looks like they got the worse things from Skype and tried to compete with Zoom in a tight schedule. There is just nothing good about Teams. The worse thing is that Microsoft offers these apps in a competitive price for the enterprise world and most companies fall for it and we eventually get stuck using it.
I've had issues with Teams on the 3 operating systems (Linux, Mac and Windows) with Mac and Linux being the worst. I don't understand how a company that created the Office Suite which is beautiful and works can create something like this.
- The UI/UX experience is a joke. It looks like no designers were involved during the conception.
- The UI flickers a lot when clicking to switch chats & groups and sending messages.
- Video and audio sometimes does not work
- Screen sharing is always a pain
- The app freezes sometimes and have to be restarted
The app just feels bulky, heavy, full of bugs and bad UI decisions.
I wish it was more like Slack and the meetings were more like Hangouts.
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.
- 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.Nrhill I can confirm that the same issue occurs on M1-based Macs. I have a new MacBook Air and today I timed it. It took 40 seconds from clicking the "Join" button in the Outlook invitation to get to the "intro" screen in Teams where you choose whether to show your video, etc. From there it took another 30 seconds to place me in to the call. Even then I could hear the participants but not see them. It took another 20 seconds for the video feeds to appear. A total of a minute and a half to join a call. Now that's frustrating.
Fortunately, there was no sharing of screens going on this call but when the call was over it took at least 30 seconds to close the window down after clicking "Leave".
As well as the extremely painful experience using the application, it also slows down other applications like another poster said.
I have to say that I'm pleased to have found this thread. I was beginning to think that it was a general problem with my shiny new MacBook but am pleased to discover it's actually Teams specifically.
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..)
- 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.UWI_student_868 Teams has been running fine on my Macbook Pro 2016 16GB RAM for the past 6 months or so until today.
Yesterday I installed the MacOS Monterey update (v12.0.1) and Teams is now an absolute debacle. Video flickering, lag on everything. For half the day today I thought it was my video card dying. All the symptoms others have described. I use Notes during meetings and I get a 5-10 second cursor lag while typing if I'm on a Teams call. Ending the call (click "Leave", get no response, wait 15 seconds) restores all my other apps to their normal speeds. I am working 100% remotely to multiple cities and it is almost impossible to use.
I completely agree. Performance is awful. Performance in a stand-alone browser is, inexplicably, better than in the electron skin. I still think it's a crime that Safari and Firefox are second-class citizens. On my rMBP (2018) sometimes kernel task comes in to throttle performance as the whole thing melts. Talking to four people at once is a struggle. Zoom manages with 500 without the fan coming on.
I've noticed that several thousand error messages appear (like the following) at times, randomly. I contacted M$'s first line support and got told something like "our developers work very hard to try to remove bugs and please provide feedback through Teams itself". I've given it basically 1 star at every opportunity available. It's overcomplicated and fundamentally fails at its main task: videoconferencing.
I've seen literally more than 1000 error messages in the developer console, many of them on line 1e6+ of some poor bit of Javascript. I'm not surprised my computer is melting. Can't you just rewrite the whole thing in QT?
- I can assure you, this matter is not resolved. I mistakenly thought this was a new post. When I read it, something called out. I have been having weird behavior on my Mac Pro for several months. Sublime Text tabs had distorted test when I dragged the cursor over. This was the most annoying. Today I removed teams completely, did a restart and no more problems.
- Sam Cosby
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- Glad to hear it. In case you haven't heard, this thread made the frontpage of Hacker News, where everyone sh1talked Teams a bunch, and I can't disagree! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32084023
I'd love to hear of improvements being made to Windows versions too.
