Easy fix performance issues Teams high cpu and extreme memory usage

This blog post helps you fix performance issues Teams.

Lately I noticed that my PC was getting slower and slower. Opening a Teams channel in Microsoft Teams took ten seconds, opening a chat conversation as well. Writing an email in Outlook was successful, but the letters appeared on the screen with a delay. The performance of Teams bothered me the most. In Task Manager I found CPU usage was high, and more than 1 GB of memory in use was no exception. There is no way to limit the memory usage of Microsoft Teams. There is a lot of complaints about performance, but Microsoft doesn’t prioritize this as an important issue yet

Luckily I have found the right settings to improve the performance of Teams. Which immediately made my entire PC less slow.

Fix performance issues Teams

Perform the 3 actions below to solve the performance problems with Microsoft Teams.

Disable GPU Hardware acceleration

1. In Teams, click your icon / photo.
2. Choose Settings.
3. In Settings, in tab general, enable “Disable GPU hardware acceleration“.
4. While you’re here, also disable “Register teams as the chat app for Office…“.
5. Restart Teams. Please note that Teams runs in the background. You must close it from your system tray (near the clock at the right bottom).

Disable all Teams addins in Outlook

1. In Outlook, click Options.
2. In the Outlook Options window, click Addins.
3. At the bottom, click Go… (next to Manage: COM Add-ins).
4. Untick Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in for Microsoft Office
5. Click OK.
6. Restart Outlook.

Clear Teams cache

1. In Windows Explorer, go to  %appdata%\Microsoft\teams .
   Then delete the following files:
   a. In tmp folder, delete all files.
   b. In Blob_storage folder, delete all files.
   c. In Cache folder, delete all files.
   d. In IndexedDB folder, delete the .db file.
   e. In GPUCache folder, delete all files.
   f. In databases folder, delete all files.
   g. In Local Storage folder, delete all files.
   h. In Application Cache > Cache folder, delete all files in it.

After these 3 modifications to your system, Teams performs much faster. As far as I know, there are no other fixing performance issues Teams available. But let me know in the comments if you experience any issues or if you have additional information and tips.

Settings for the system administrator

This section was added after one of my commentors asked me:

– Is there a registry key I can use for this?

As an system administrator as my profession, I surely understand this question. I always want my users to have a more than great experience on their device. In the meanwhile, it must be a safe environment and it should cost me as little time as possible :) So let me me answer this question for the GPU Hardware Acceleration and the Outlook addin

Automate disabling GPU Hardware Acceleration in Teams

User settings for Teams are saved in a JSON file desktop-config.json:
%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Teams\desktop-config.json
or as you see the path in Windows Explorer, probably:
C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams\desktop-config.json

This JSON file is UTF-8 encoded so you can open and read it with any text editor, like Notepad++. Search for DisableGPU in the file, and you will find “disableGpu”:false or “disableGpu”:true.

If you want to automate this setting for your users, you need to search and replace “disableGpu”:false for “disableGpu”:true. This can be done with a simple Powershell Script. And then let the script run via a GPO, SCCM or Intune

Automate disabling Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-in in Outlook

The load behavior of the Microsoft Teams Meeting Add-In is controlled in the Registry. To set this add-in to Disabled, do the following:

1. In your Registry Editor, go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\TeamsAddin.FastConnect
2. Double-click LoadBehavior, set the value data to 2, and click OK. This disables the load at startup.
   If you want to enable load at startup, change it to 3

This setting can be easily deployed with a GPO policy. If you’re on Intune and Azure Active Directory, you may want to deploy a simple PS1 script that modifies the entry.