MS Teams in Linux VM: RAM usage

Question

Hi there,
there is a nice article "How Microsoft Teams uses memory" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-memory-usage-perf).
I just read the information "Hardware requirements for Microsoft Teams" (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/hardware-requirements-for-the-teams-app)

I would like to read some more information about "Why Microsoft Teams uses multiple GB RAM".

I have configured a Linux VM (1CPU, 1.5GB RAM): Running normal things without Teams like writing a text, or reading CPU load is 3% and 400 MB RAM is used.
But why does MS Teams consume so much RAM even without beeing in an conference?
I understand, that doing videoprocessing needs more RAM than writing a text, but 1 GB for TEAMS should be really enough. (No problems with video-conferencing used jitsee - there the VM used 700 MB.)
But in TEAMS just open a text chat window and doing nothing else the VM used more than 1 GB.
And if you want to do a video chat like via jitsee in firefox than there is no fun.

It is realy cool, that in times of corona home schooling I do not need to buy a operation system for my childen so that they can use MS Teams via linux.

It would be very cool if Teams could be developed with low hardware resources in mind.
Yes, RAM is realy more cheaper than in the old days - but wasting RAM is a kind of bad code smell.
And modern low cost Laptops have permanent fixed RAM, therefor upgrading RAM just because corona home schooling via MS Teams is not possible.

And that point is independent of programming Teams for Windows or for other systems: Please stay in a limt of 1 GB RAM.

Answer 1

If you think that's bad, you should see how much it uses on Windows :D It's just how modern dev works sadly, everyone is going the easy route of using Electron and stuff, bloatware is the new norm.

Answer 2

Hi @sporack

Keeping performance within acceptable limits is always likely to be a challenge, especially when the application functionality changes often, which is the case with Teams. It’s important to apply Windows and driver updates to workstations.

In my experience, if a workstation has free memory, Teams will take some of that memory to cache data and keep structures in memory instead of going to disk. As demand grows from other applications, Teams releases memory. It’s therefore an expected condition to see the Teams processes occupy a lot of memory, even when apparently idle.

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