After we migrated from Skype to Teams, we did see so many more benefits to Teams over Skype. It has been a great tool, however, a very interesting thing has happened. Sometime end of 2020 we notice everyone on a company laptop (they are all similar make and model) having a terrible time with teams performances.
First we have HP Laptops with 8th Gen Core i5 128gb SSD drives, 8-16 gb ram. These are rather nice computers actually. (true they are not brand new but not all that shabby)
Here are two constant issues we have
1) When there is a meeting with 10 or more people someone will randomly will see the hands raised rather late. While everything else is live and not frozen, you will look for hands.. nothing... but most everyone else in the meeting will see all the hands raised. When this happens, the Chat functions are working live, so we will ask them to just put a C or Comment in the chat and we call on them from there.
2) When on a call, even with 1 person, but it gets worse the more you have on the call, We will share the screen and navigate to a webpage. The webpage will be absolutely unresponsive, freeze and crash. This does also happen when you share screen and launch something heavy like Bluebeam or AutoCad but that is understandable. ITs when you share just a simple webpage. As workaround to this was to log into a Remote Desktop session to the server and share the RDweb screen. which seems to work well, but not practical.
Here is what i have done to debug this. I have followed the articles and turned off all the GPU acceleration, turned off the Chats, the links to MS Office. I even turned off the "new experience" none of that seem to make any difference.
When i look at Task Manager, without starting a call just sitting idle Teams will be using 7% of the CPU and about 256mb ram. Once i start a call with other people and share my screen, closing all other apps just Chrome or Edge open. i'll be at 80-100% 5-6GB Ram 60-70% ram.
It seems to be a CPU issue. however, its not just one or two laptops but i can confirm it on atleast 20 with the same specs.
MS website shows very very low specs to make Teams run, we are much higher then those specs be far.
Incidentally, i will regularly share my screen on a zoom call with 200 connections, and play a 1080P Video with audio, no issues at all. the video will make it to the users with no skip no delay. The cpu while playing a video and sharing the screen in Zoom will be more about 30% cpu and very little Ram.
What are you all seeing for REAL REQUIREMENTS to run the team and actually do work in it?
Unfortunately, this issue is driving us to only use Teams for quick chats but use Zoom for actual meetings, which is very unfortunate.
Your thoughts are very much appreciated.
