Ever feel as though Microsoft Teams is operating slowly? Are you in search of tweaks to boost MS Teams performance issues? Microsoft Teams is known to be a memory and CPU hogger. If there isn’t enough memory for other programs to run, this can cause the entire laptop or computer to slow down. But focusing on computer memory might not be the sole reason why Microsoft Teams (or any other applications for that matter) is running slow – there are other possible reasons too.
It is very common that the first thing you will need to check when an online application is suddenly running slow is to check your Internet connection. That is a very sensible initial step to troubleshooting the slowness of Microsoft Teams on your computer.
But if your Internet connection is not the problem? What else can you do to improve the slowness of Microsoft Teams?
In this article, we will provide you with some optimizing Microsoft Teams performance tips and ways how you can improve the speed of your Microsoft Teams.
What's In Here
1. Check Your Internet Connection
As mentioned earlier, the first thing you might want to check is your Internet connection. This is one of the common issues with Microsoft Teams’ performance.
Some questions you might want to ask yourself are:
- Is someone else within the house or area who is connected to the same router and is heavily using the Internet? Streaming or watching online maybe? Or playing online multiplayer games? Someone is having another online video conference session? These may affect your Internet connection, especially if you are using satellite Internet which is known for instability.
- Did you check if there was a maintenance notice from your Internet service provider? You might want to call them and check if there was an ongoing outage or maintenance which may affect your connection.
- Is your modem or router working properly? Try restarting your modem and/or router and see if that fixes your connection. Worst case, you might need to replace your Internet router if the device is no longer working as expected.
If you think that your current Internet connection is no longer enough to provide stable connectivity against your needs, then consider upgrading your subscription.
2. Optimize Your Windows 10 or 11 PC
One of the tweaks to boost Microsoft Teams’ slow performance is to check your Windows 10 or 11 PC health. When was the last time you did maintenance on your computer? One thing to remember is that your computer does not have unlimited resources.
Checking the disk space, defragging your disks, memory consumption checks, and many more are some areas that you should inspect. You can read here for some more tips on how you can optimize your Windows 10 or 11.
3. Check If Your Microsoft Teams Version Is Updated
You can check if you are using the latest version of Microsoft Team by clicking on the three-dots menu that is located beside your profile’s avatar. Then select and click the “Check for updates” option.
By doing so, your Microsoft Team application will check your software if it is up-to-date. If not, it will automatically update your application by downloading the latest version – or updates.
There might be fixes in the latest version that resolves any performance or connection-related issues from the existing or old Microsoft Teams version. So, updating to the latest version might bring some good results.
4. Check Microsoft Teams’ Service Status
If it is odd that your Microsoft Team suddenly is slow when you have not made any drastic changes in your computer or if it was working just fine before the problem, then it is worth checking Microsoft Teams’ service status.
There is a slight chance that there is something wrong with the cloud services or Microsoft services. A quick look at Microsoft’s Service Health monitor will give you an idea of all the services if they are up and running. To check, open a browser and go to https://admin.microsoft.com/servicestatus.
5. Disabling Microsoft Teams’ GPU Hardware Acceleration
Technically and logically, enabling GPU hardware acceleration should be helpful to you while using your computer. When a graphics processing unit (GPU) and a central processing unit (CPU) are used together, processing-intensive processes like deep learning, analytics, and engineering applications can be made more efficient. By transferring processing-intensive application parts to the GPU, the GPU, created by NVIDIA in 2007, offers much better application performance.
However, with GPU hardware acceleration enabled is sometimes not helpful at all and can affect the overall performance of an application. And by disabling the GPU hardware acceleration was proven to have improved the performance of Microsoft Teams as discussed here.
To disable the GPU hardware acceleration of Microsoft Teams, click again the three-dots menu and select Settings – General. Then under the Application, you will find the tick box option “Disable GPU hardware acceleration (requires restarting Teams)“, check it. And restart Teams.
6. Disabling Microsoft Teams’ Add-ins From Outlook
Other tweaks to boost Microsoft Teams’ slow performance are to look for any other dependencies. This means that there might be other applications that use Microsoft Teams as an add-on. One of the known applications is Microsoft Outlook.
To disable the Microsoft Teams’ add-ins from Outlook, click the File menu then select Options.
In the Outlook Options pop-up, click Add-ins. On the right panel, look for the “Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office” under Add-ins. Then click the Go button found on the lower part of the window.
In the small pop-up COM Add-ins window, find and untick/uncheck the Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office. You may need to restart your Outlook for the changes to take effect.
7. Clearing the Microsoft Teams’ Cache
You might need to clean the cache for Microsoft Teams if it isn’t functioning properly. The Teams Add-ons, browser cache, icons, thumbnails, local messaging history, and display images will all be deleted as a result. It ought should assist in resolving problems like suddenly being unable to log in to Teams as well as other performance problems that keep getting worse.
Follow these steps on a Windows 10 computer to delete the Teams cache.
- Close Microsoft Teams completely by selecting Quit by right-clicking the Teams icon in the system tray (near the Windows date and time).
- Pressing R while still holding down the Windows key will launch the Windows Run box.
- This address should be copied and pasted into the Run box:
%appdata%\Microsoft\Teams - Delete ONLY the files inside the following folders:
- blob_storage
- Cache
- Code Cache
- databases
- GPUCache
- IndexedDB
- Local Storage
- tmp
- Restart your computer, then run Teams again. You will be prompted to sign in as if it were your first time.
8. Reinstall Microsoft Teams
If doing the steps above does not work, you can try to uninstall first your Microsoft Teams and do a fresh installation. This can possibly replace the files and dependencies that might be corrupted.
Concluding Words
Like any other application, Microsoft Teams, as an online application, may have different reasons why it will suddenly perform slowly. Being an online application, you should first remember, that it has a dependency on a lot of factors – Internet connection, cloud services, etc. There are numerous ways to troubleshoot the problem with different solutions.
If you encounter this problem, what solution worked for you to optimize Microsoft Teams’ performance? Do not hesitate to share it with us so that we can add it here and help others. You can do it by using the comment section.
