7 ms·

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering

by Aaargh20318 2y ago

The most incredible thing about the new iPads is that even with the crazy fast M4 chip MS Teams manages to crawl to a halt. Clearly it takes all the engineering skills of the largest and most valuable software company in the world to make text entry go at about 1 fps on a chip as powerful as the M4.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
akmarinov 2y ago
That's usually what cross platform at an enterprise company at scale gets you
chongli 2y ago
MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it. I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches everything and just trash the entire thing. Somehow, they’ve managed to make caching slow everything down rather than provide a speed up.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- treyd 2y ago
  Why is that not at least done asynchronously? I thought part of the whole narrative of shipping these new terrible pieces of software as standalone Google Chrome instances was that it makes it easier to spawn async JS workers for background tasks and whatnot?
  - chongli 2y ago
    I think that’s what it’s doing. If you have a conversation with a person spanning hundreds of messages (over many weeks) it’ll be updating the status light next to their name on every single message in the history. The more messages in the history, the more workers you get!
  - bluGill 2y ago
    async is still difficult. There is no getting around data synchronization issues. either you need to spend a lot of time in design or will get constant problems with things like not having a mutex when you should, mutex deadlock, holding a mutex too long, locking/unlocking too often. I haven't done async JS, but I've done enough async elsewhere to know that language cannot work around bad design.
    - xnx 2y ago
      I thought this was mostly/fully solved with CRDTs?
      - lucianbr 2y ago
        You still need to design a CRDT that solves your particular problem, you don't just say the magic word "CRDT" and the problem is gone. And the performance will depend on how good the design is.
- beanjuiceII 2y ago
  hmm I use teams daily all day for work and don't have these issues, maybe your org messed something up?
  - chongli 2y ago
    I have used it at two different orgs (a university and a company) and it had the same issue on both. Perhaps your org has the settings figured out!
  - dagmx 2y ago
    It is also possible that you don’t notice the slow downs? Teams installed directly from the App Store or Microsoft on any device I own (high end windows/mac/ipad) devices are all terribly slow
  - packetlost 2y ago
    I use it exclusively as a progressive web app on Linux and it's not particularly slow, but it is buggy as all hell. Easily the worst rich text editing experience of any chat client I've ever used. Teams is without a doubt the worst piece of software I'm required to use on a daily basis
- nunez 2y ago
  If you think Teams is bad, then you haven't had to endure Google Chat.
  - birdman3131 2y ago
    Can't have technical debt if you throw it all away every couple years and start over. Work started off using Google talk. I am expecting something to replace google chat like they did talk and hangouts.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  Have you tried ‘New Teams’? It’s exactly the same but then you can have to open twice and drain your resources much quicker.
  - z500 2y ago
    And as a bonus, Outlook stops reporting presence!
heroprotagonist 2y ago
Every character you type results in some sort of hit to their telemetry server. It will include the actual letter you typed, if you or your org are not configured to be in EU. With their EU configuration option (pulled from server every launch) it will only report the fact that you typed _something_. Now if that's not fun enough, their telemetry also covers mouse movements. Go ahead and watch your CPU as you spin your mouse in circles around the Teams window. For extra fun, block their telemetry server and watch Teams bloat in RAM, to as much as your system has, as it keeps every action you take in local memory as it waits for the ability to talk to that telemetry server again. If you're going to block their telemetry its best to fake an accept via some mitm proxy and send back a 200 code. I do not know exactly how much this applies to iPad version, compared to their desktop apps. Mobile offers both more and less data possibilities. It's a different context.
- Aaargh20318 2y ago
  I’m in the EU and should have the EU configuration. The problem mainly occurs when I mention someone in a reply to a thread. Once I type @<name> the text input just slows down so much I can type much faster than it can render the text.
  - heroprotagonist 2y ago
    It's still going through the same telemetry action, it just omits the actual character you typed. And yes, it is character by character. That collection (eg, the timestamp you hit the character, channel/person it was to, etc) is the inefficiency causing your typing to slow. If it was a straight text box that they polled contents of _occasionally_ or after you hit 'send', it would be a much better user experience.
    - zamadatix 2y ago
      As much as I dislike overbearing telemetry in the context of an M4 or even an N95 the computer should be more than capable of logging a few kb of telemetry about inputs per second without even a notice on the performance statistics. The problem remains that every single thing in the app is just implemented god awful slow and would still be regardless if it's also recording telemetry on the input data or not.
mft_ 2y ago
LOL, you wanna try it on my ~2 generations old Core i5 corporate laptop. Sometimes, the first steps of drawing the calendar view are roughly the same speed as me drawing it in Paint. Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on. (Has anyone done a deep dive into Teams to explain what on earth is going on? I mean, if VSCode can be fast despite its underlying architecture, surely something could be done about Teams?)
- pmontra 2y ago
  Do companies using Teams have a choice of using something else or are their C*Os and IT departments married with Microsoft? If the latter, they'll use whatever Microsoft throws at them, even if it doesn't work.
  - deergomoo 2y ago
    Teams' USP is that it's part of the suite corporations are almost universally already paying for.
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on. Then the developers will complain the hardware is unusable to do their job even though that this was a supercomputer back in the day. Then you say "No, it's the software please fix it."
  - zsims 2y ago
    The problem is, it's not their software. No control over Slack, Outlook etc
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Weird, a statically built ELF that supports TLS1.3 + HTTP1.1 is like ~30kb, all you need is Emacs as a UI and you have Teams 2 at 1.0e-5% resource usage.
- deergomoo 2y ago
rkangel 2y ago
Teams on the desktop has improved with their "v2" client. It's not the world's fastest piece of software, but I find it to not be embarrassingly slow now (on a reasonably specced machine). One as to hope that the same perfomance lens will now be turned on the mobile apps.
meindnoch 2y ago
The wonders of web development.
jandeboevrie 2y ago
Try Pidgin with the excellent ms teams plugin: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams - less than 100mb ram usage and notifications that still work after an hour. Only for (video) calls you need to open teams..
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 2y ago
That's the power of Javascript!
MarkSweep 2y ago
What’s the modern form of “what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”? “What Tim giveth, Satya taketh away”? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

akmarinov 2y ago

That's usually what cross platform at an enterprise company at scale gets you

chongli 2y ago

MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it. I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches everything and just trash the entire thing. Somehow, they’ve managed to make caching slow everything down rather than provide a speed up.

Dalewyn 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
treyd 2y ago
Why is that not at least done asynchronously? I thought part of the whole narrative of shipping these new terrible pieces of software as standalone Google Chrome instances was that it makes it easier to spawn async JS workers for background tasks and whatnot?
- chongli 2y ago
  I think that’s what it’s doing. If you have a conversation with a person spanning hundreds of messages (over many weeks) it’ll be updating the status light next to their name on every single message in the history. The more messages in the history, the more workers you get!
- bluGill 2y ago
  async is still difficult. There is no getting around data synchronization issues. either you need to spend a lot of time in design or will get constant problems with things like not having a mutex when you should, mutex deadlock, holding a mutex too long, locking/unlocking too often. I haven't done async JS, but I've done enough async elsewhere to know that language cannot work around bad design.
  - xnx 2y ago
    I thought this was mostly/fully solved with CRDTs?
    - lucianbr 2y ago
      You still need to design a CRDT that solves your particular problem, you don't just say the magic word "CRDT" and the problem is gone. And the performance will depend on how good the design is.
beanjuiceII 2y ago
hmm I use teams daily all day for work and don't have these issues, maybe your org messed something up?
- chongli 2y ago
  I have used it at two different orgs (a university and a company) and it had the same issue on both. Perhaps your org has the settings figured out!
- dagmx 2y ago
  It is also possible that you don’t notice the slow downs? Teams installed directly from the App Store or Microsoft on any device I own (high end windows/mac/ipad) devices are all terribly slow
- packetlost 2y ago
  I use it exclusively as a progressive web app on Linux and it's not particularly slow, but it is buggy as all hell. Easily the worst rich text editing experience of any chat client I've ever used. Teams is without a doubt the worst piece of software I'm required to use on a daily basis
nunez 2y ago
If you think Teams is bad, then you haven't had to endure Google Chat.
- birdman3131 2y ago
  Can't have technical debt if you throw it all away every couple years and start over. Work started off using Google talk. I am expecting something to replace google chat like they did talk and hangouts.
lostlogin 2y ago
Have you tried ‘New Teams’? It’s exactly the same but then you can have to open twice and drain your resources much quicker.
- z500 2y ago
  And as a bonus, Outlook stops reporting presence!

heroprotagonist 2y ago

Every character you type results in some sort of hit to their telemetry server. It will include the actual letter you typed, if you or your org are not configured to be in EU. With their EU configuration option (pulled from server every launch) it will only report the fact that you typed _something_. Now if that's not fun enough, their telemetry also covers mouse movements. Go ahead and watch your CPU as you spin your mouse in circles around the Teams window. For extra fun, block their telemetry server and watch Teams bloat in RAM, to as much as your system has, as it keeps every action you take in local memory as it waits for the ability to talk to that telemetry server again. If you're going to block their telemetry its best to fake an accept via some mitm proxy and send back a 200 code. I do not know exactly how much this applies to iPad version, compared to their desktop apps. Mobile offers both more and less data possibilities. It's a different context.

Aaargh20318 2y ago
I’m in the EU and should have the EU configuration. The problem mainly occurs when I mention someone in a reply to a thread. Once I type @<name> the text input just slows down so much I can type much faster than it can render the text.
- heroprotagonist 2y ago
  It's still going through the same telemetry action, it just omits the actual character you typed. And yes, it is character by character. That collection (eg, the timestamp you hit the character, channel/person it was to, etc) is the inefficiency causing your typing to slow. If it was a straight text box that they polled contents of _occasionally_ or after you hit 'send', it would be a much better user experience.
  - zamadatix 2y ago
    As much as I dislike overbearing telemetry in the context of an M4 or even an N95 the computer should be more than capable of logging a few kb of telemetry about inputs per second without even a notice on the performance statistics. The problem remains that every single thing in the app is just implemented god awful slow and would still be regardless if it's also recording telemetry on the input data or not.

mft_ 2y ago

LOL, you wanna try it on my ~2 generations old Core i5 corporate laptop. Sometimes, the first steps of drawing the calendar view are roughly the same speed as me drawing it in Paint. Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on. (Has anyone done a deep dive into Teams to explain what on earth is going on? I mean, if VSCode can be fast despite its underlying architecture, surely something could be done about Teams?)

pmontra 2y ago
Do companies using Teams have a choice of using something else or are their C*Os and IT departments married with Microsoft? If the latter, they'll use whatever Microsoft throws at them, even if it doesn't work.
- deergomoo 2y ago
  Teams' USP is that it's part of the suite corporations are almost universally already paying for.
phkahler 2y ago
>> Maybe someone should normalise giving developers crappy laptops to develop on. Then the developers will complain the hardware is unusable to do their job even though that this was a supercomputer back in the day. Then you say "No, it's the software please fix it."
- zsims 2y ago
  The problem is, it's not their software. No control over Slack, Outlook etc
intelVISA 2y ago
Weird, a statically built ELF that supports TLS1.3 + HTTP1.1 is like ~30kb, all you need is Emacs as a UI and you have Teams 2 at 1.0e-5% resource usage.
deergomoo 2y ago

rkangel 2y ago

Teams on the desktop has improved with their "v2" client. It's not the world's fastest piece of software, but I find it to not be embarrassingly slow now (on a reasonably specced machine). One as to hope that the same perfomance lens will now be turned on the mobile apps.

meindnoch 2y ago

The wonders of web development.

jandeboevrie 2y ago

Try Pidgin with the excellent ms teams plugin: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-teams - less than 100mb ram usage and notifications that still work after an hour. Only for (video) calls you need to open teams..

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

DeathArrow 2y ago

That's the power of Javascript!

MarkSweep 2y ago

What’s the modern form of “what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away”? “What Tim giveth, Satya taketh away”? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law