It is possible that Microsoft Teams’ videoconferencing quality comes at the price of subpar computer performance. The application may be the cause of high memory usage and CPU utilization. Since Teams is built on an Electron platform, it constantly loads many libraries, causing load on the memory. Moreover, since Teams streams video on both fronts upload and download, there might be cases when your computer’s CPU cannot handle the process altogether. This post will guide you on how to fix Microsoft Teams’ high memory and CPU usage issues in Windows 11/10.
Fix Microsoft Teams High Memory and CPU Usage Issue
While there’s no specific solution to this problem that can reduce the CPU and memory consumption, here’s a list of suggestions one could give a shot to try and solve the problem.
- Turn off Hardware Acceleration
- Clear Microsoft Teams’ Cache
- Reduce Visual Effects
- Close Background Applications
- Reinstall Microsoft Teams
1] Turn off Hardware Acceleration
By default, Microsoft has the GPU Hardware Acceleration option turned on, which increases the load on your GPU and memory. Here’s how you can turn it off.
- Open up the Microsoft Teams application and navigate to Settings by clicking on the three-dotted icon next to the Profile and choosing Settings.
- Navigate to the General tab and Disable GPU hardware acceleration.
- Now, shut down the program completely by right-clicking the Teams icon in the system tray and choosing to close the program.
- Restart your computer and the Teams application and check for improvements.
2] Clear Microsoft Teams’ Cache
The cache folder can sometimes be accessed by Microsoft Teams randomly, leading to excessive memory and CPU consumption. Here’s how you can remove the cached files to prevent that from happening.
- Start by pulling up the Run dialog (Windows + R).
- Next, type in %appdata% and press Enter.
- Navigate to C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Teams.
- Here, carefully select and delete only the files within the following folders: tmp folder, blob_storage, cache, GPUcache, databases, and local storage. (Note: make sure only to delete the .db file in the IndexedDB folder)
- Now, restart your computer and notice whether you can see a difference.
3] Reduce Visual Effects
It may be possible that Microsoft Teams is consuming a lot of memory since it is trying to load graphic elements at its highest resolution. Here’s how you can ask Windows to reduce the visual effects on your computer.
- Pull up the Start Search Box and search for Adjust Performance. Here, select the main listed result stating Adjust the appearance and performance of Windows.
- This will pull up the Performance Options, navigate to the Visual Effects tab, and adjust for Best Performance.
- This will disable video effects and animations. With that done, restart your computer and check whether you can notice any difference.
4] Close Background Applications
While you may be thinking that Microsoft Teams is the reason behind your CPU and memory being out of resources, it could also be possible that Teams interact with other applications in the background, causing performance issues.
- Pull up the Task Manager by searching for the same in the Start Search Box.
- Next, check for applications running in the background (basically applications you did not run and had been running in the background unnecessarily)
- Click on the application consuming the bandwidth and choose End Task.
That said, Microsoft Teams has been a lifesaver for organizations. Reducing the memory consumption from Microsoft Teams might help the computer run smoothly overall while allocating enough bandwidth to the other processes running. I hope this tutorial was able to help you with the task of reducing memory and CPU consumption with Microsoft Teams.
