Performance of Microsoft Teams
shilocase (via Hacker News):
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.
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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.
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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.
There’s a long thread. This is with the Electron version of Teams. Microsoft has announced that it’s switching from Chromium to Edge later this year, though I’m not sure how much that will help.
I’ve also heard of people preferring the Web version of Teams since the app is Intel-only.
Previously:
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Teams is not most certainly Intel-only:
https://pasteboard.co/gEjcvpFS2cbJ.png
While I saw a big jump in performance when upgrading to M1 Pro from Intel, it is still a very slow application. I wish MS invested in improving their iPad version and bringing it as a native app to the Mac.
@Macros I’m not sure how you are getting that. I did a fresh download of Teams (1.5.00.17261) from Microsoft’s site while writing this post, and it’s only Intel.
Teams isn't much better on Windows. Of all the conferencing apps I'm forced to use, it's by far the worst. The pithy 13 inch company Thinkpad I use every day is brought to its knees by Teams.
Teams is available in ARM-native form in the beta channel. If you're using the release channel, you'll still get an Intel-native version. There's still plenty of issues with it apparently.
https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/25/microsoft-teams-apple-silicon-mac/
There were numerous reasons why I was happy to leave the job I left last year, but being able to uninstall Teams was definitely high on the list. I still shudder at those ugly massive purple notifications that would hide behind the native notifications until they finally fixed that mid-last year. What an awful program, and Electron isn't solely to blame because no other Electron app I use runs as terribly as Teams did.
Teams never shows as an app "using significant energy" on my MacBook Pro. It does concern me that when installing it installs a separate audio driver of some sort, but since I'm using Ventura I assume these non-kext extensions are safer. I also worry that it allows my computer to be spied upon somehow by my company, but maybe I'm just paranoid about these things.
Hmmm... I'm not faking that screenshot I linked to!
https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/25/microsoft-teams-apple-silicon-mac/
I have version 1.5.00.18611 which shows up as Application (Universal)
There are Beta versions for Apple Silicone Macs available here: https://github.com/ItzLevvie/MicrosoftTeams-msinternal/blob/master/defconfig2
Yeah, those are just internal builds of the Apple Silicon version. I've been running it for a few months though, and it's quite good. Performance is way improved over running it in Rosetta.
The thing that gets me the most about all of this is how iChat used to be able to do almost all of this in 2007. IIRC, the Leopard release was the one that introduced the ability to share Keynote presentations, screen sharing, etc. It was a native app, as far as I know.
