Teams Performance

Steel Contributor

Will anyone from the Teams product group offer an update on performance of the windows app?  It seems like the majority of comments today are around CPU usage, memory usage, latency for chat history, etc, but nobody seems to be willing to offer a meaningful comment around it.

 

For two years, all we've heard is that the group is looking into improving performance.  Does that mean a new app is coming out soon NOT built on the 'super efficient' Electron rails?

48 Replies
I guess we will have some updates around Ignite, but for now not specific news on Teams Client performance
Teams has been improving over time. If you compare Teams client today, vs. Teams client last year, there is a massive difference in performance. There def. is more work that could be done, but I have definitely noticed changes being introduced over time.

I agree, Teams is using less resources now than a year ago. But there is still room for improvements.

 

@Dustin Halvorson I guess you have seen the uservoice about this and Microsoft answered there that they have improved performance for the Teams client and they are still working on improvements.

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/17219609-teams-uses-600mb-and-...

Is it though...

 

TeamsRAM.png

That's just the client sitting idly in the tray, within our company tenant with just 10 teams or so I've joined...

Memory usage != performance
;)

@Dustin Halvorson there are no plans that I've heard of for any new app not built on Electron. There have been significant enhancements to Teams that make it faster for things like starting chats, navigating etc. There are still a few areas of this to come e.g. faster tenant switching.

 

Fundamentally Teams client will continue to operate like a browser, with a memory footprint like a browser.

Sure, try telling this to anyone running Teams on a laptop/netbook with 4GB RAM :)

I mean I guess technically in that case if you run out of memory, then Memory usage = performance lol :). I remember it used to use like 1.2GB or something crazy, I don't usually see it going much over 750MB these days, it def. can still use some tweaking which I'm sure will continue to improve over time.

@Chris Webb Yet the minimum requirements still say 2GB!  That's unrealistic.

 

In an organization that wants to move to Teams that has spinning disks, and 4GB of RAM in desktops, it's a product that is impossible to support.

 

It's frustrating to see the team continuing to post on things like integrations with third parties, when the core of the product is still extremely inefficient, and there doesn't look to be any priority put towards it.

To be fair, I have never seen Teams Desktop client using 1 GB neither 2 GB ofr RAM memory

It's not just Teams running on that device though. And I've seen it very close to 1GB.

If there are no plans to move away from electron then the uservoice ticket should be closed as "working as intended" so people don't hold out hope for improvements.  If you aren't intending to fix performance then maybe focus on adding/improving teams functionality available via API so 3rd party clients can take over some of this performance work.  

@Chris Webb Thanks. I agree memory is not exceeding ~800mb lately. Maybe some update fixed this :)

 

On the other hand, my CPU spikes were still dramatic. I fixed this by disabling the GPU rendering in Teams (strange? I would say GPU rendering should improve the performance instead of degrading).

See https://www.itexperience.net/2020/01/10/fix-performance-issues-teams-high-cpu-memory-usage/

He also speaks about disabling the Outlook add-ins and integration, but actually I want to keep those features. I'm happy with the performance for now.

@jimharpert why wouldn't you want it to use as much CPU as possible when it has something to do? Surely it should just do things as fast as possible and then be done.

Scrolling through the Teams chats was almost impossible. It took 10+ seconds to display the text. And when I scrolled up, it would take another 10 seconds to display the other posts/texts.
CPU was spiking at that same time.
Now I disabled that GPU rendering, and performance in teams has improved greatly. CPU is below 10% (which saves my laptop battery as well). SO I don't see any reason to enable it.

I'm randomly, daily, experiencing a laggy computer. Checking the Task manger when this happens reveals Teams using 30-50% cpu when I haven't touched teams. The cpu usage doesn't subside after a while either, it seems to keep doing it forever.

 

Force closing/restarting teams solves the issue, until tomorrow again I guess. Had this happen a few times last year as well, but it behaved well most of the time until recently where it happens more often.

Can't believe how bad it is. I have a relatively new 6-core XPS, and Teams can bring it to a hault! Using up 50% of my CPU for absolutely no reason, and it just continues to run until I kill it. I had to switch to the web version, lol. How do you build a desktop version that performs worse than the web app?! Wow.

Hello I am still seeing 60% CPU usage and 40% memory running the Teams app in background. I noticed my laptop fan working overtime and running super hot, and it is all Teams doing this without even being in the foreground. If this is 'significant improvement' as everyone has said they have made, the bar must be very low.

@Chris Webb it still regularly uses 1.5GB RAM and over 30% CPU during meetings, slowing our 8th Gen Intel i5 CPU 8GB RAM HP EliteDesk G4 Mini PCs to a crawl when users have so much as 5 Chrome tabs, the Outlook 365 Desktop app, the OneNote UWP App, and the Microsoft To-Do app open.

 

Normally I would agree that memory usage != performance issues, however, when your machines have to split available RAM between the integrated graphics and other mandatory company programs, it's hardly acceptable to see Teams using 20% of the total available, especially when other apps built on the same ElectronJS platform (Discord & Slack, for example) manage to consume almost nothing during a call or when switching text channels.

pastedImage_30.png

 

When I use MS Teams to join meetings from my home computer with a 4th Gen i7 and 24GB RAM, it still chugs while utilizing the same resources, albeit a tad less CPU. To be clear, my home PC is able to switch to other applications a little faster, but the extra RAM and processing power don't seem to help Teams performance at all, indicating a problem with the code that makes up Teams' core.


I understand development takes time, but it's going on 6+ years now with Teams still exhibiting performance issues. Maybe it's time for a rewrite of Teams from the ground up similarly to Slack's recent rewrite?

 

Tagging @Juan Carlos González Martín and @jimharpert so they can see Teams using more than 1GB RAM at least once in their life. Also looping in @Vasil Michev and @Eric DeVaudreuil because they're spot on with their prior comments about high resource usage. Also making @Steven Collier aware of why one might not want to see a single application utilize such high amounts of resources.