Microsoft Teams performance improves with framework upgrade

Our goal is to improve performance with every Teams update for our customers. The latest version of the Microsoft Teams desktop client now demonstrates further improvements in latency for key scenarios. The performance gain is mainly attributed to the upgrade of the framework, which we introduced this month.

The upgrade brings performance benefit to both Windows and Mac desktop users when they are interacting with the application. The upgraded Teams framework provides technical benefits including rendering the HTML tree faster, running JavaScript and serializing arrays more efficiently.

We went through a comprehensive analysis of our key user scenarios from workloads to our internal audiences as well as A/B experimentation. The upgraded framework showed improvements across the board, especially for P95 metric, which means that 95 percent of the time, the experience is better than metric. Tracking performance metrics at the 95th percentile signals if improvements apply to most users, including those with low-end devices and poor network conditions

Users can enjoy a greater fluidity experience from day-to-day application interactions
The most common action for a user in Teams is to switch between different chats, channels, and activity feeds. Over the past two years, switching between chat threads is now 32% faster, switching between channels is 39% faster. This leads to a more fluid experience that will keep you in the flow.

Figure 1: Ongoing Optimizations has improved core Teams performance scenarios since June 2020

Improved meeting experiences from faster joining and interaction
Another common scenario of our day-to-day life with Teams is joining a meeting. We are excited to share that the framework upgrade improved the join time by 21%, and responsiveness during meetings has improved. For example, the latency of raising your hand has improved by 16%.

Today’s upgrade is just part of our continual focus this year on performance improvements, as we shared in the recent blog post, "Performance enhancements to Microsoft Teams lead to faster response times."

We continue to focus and invest in Microsoft Teams performance optimization, and we value the customer and partner feedback that helps us to prioritize the most critical scenarios.