Copilot gets slower and slower

Hi Customer, 

We appreciate you contacting Microsoft Community for assistance. 

As you described, I see that you're experiencing slow performance and session interruptions with Copilot in Edge. This can happen due to several reasons, such as browser settings, network issues, or system resource limitations. 

I understand how inconvenient it can be when Copilot is slow and interrupts your workflow. Let me help you improve Copilot's performance and avoid getting kicked out of your session with following steps: 

• Clear your browser cache: Go to Edge settings, find the option to clear browsing data, and select "Cached images and files."
• Check your internet connection: Ensure you have a stable and fast internet connection.
• Close unnecessary tabs and applications: This frees up system resources, helping Copilot run more smoothly.
• Update your browser: Make sure Edge is up-to-date by checking for updates in the browser settings.
• Restart your computer: Sometimes, a simple restart can resolve performance issues.

Besides, if this issue persists, we highly encourage you to share your feedback and suggestions through this link: Microsoft 365 Copilot app · Community. The Microsoft product development team monitors this site around the clock and will review your requests for consideration. This is the most effective way to ensure your voice is heard and to help improve the products and services for everyone. 

We hope this information will be helpful to you. Please feel free to let us know if you still have any questions or concerns. 

Thank you for your understanding and contributions. 

Best Regards, 

Clover-L - MSFT | Microsoft Community Support Specialist 

If you cannot provide a meaningful answer, no answer is better than this. Your solution does not add any value, in fact you are needlessly wasting peoples time. Given the original concern was already about time being wasted, further wasting their time seems almost vindictive.

The slowness happens as the size of the context increases. Since AI is essentially amnestic (stateless) the entire conversation history needs to be passed back and forth every time. Over the course of a large conversation this grows, which in turn causes things to slow down. Especially if you have it generating stuff like blocks of code or passing large blocks of text.

This is not a uniquely Copilot issue, it happens on most AI platforms although I agree that Copilot seems to get hit worse than others, perhaps some optimization that can be done on the back end?

As of right now though, there isn't really a good solution; larger contexts means AI is able to understand larger/more complex conversations but it also means more data going back and forth on every reply. Smaller contexts lead to AI "forgetting things" which can also be equally frustrating.

The other possibility is they are hitting scale issues so things are slowing down due to resource limitations on their side.

Either way, there's not much you or I can do right now, just have to hope that some program manager at MS has something on the roadmap to try fix it.

It's not slow when using a private account, it's only slow when using the corporate user account. It seems to be linked to authentications, and it seem to authenticate every answer and prompt separately. E.g. just going into a previous discussion causes the answers to be hidden for a long while until it finally authenticates and the provides the conversation record. If the responses contains code, the response text is separately managed from the code responses. So those loads yet for a longer period.

The Edge browser suggest to stop waiting for the unresponsive site multiple times. I do not know who's fault it is, I suppose it propaly is in how corporate accounts are managed by the it departments. As private accounts have no issues loading.

I did a test conversation asking "Who is the president of Finland." This was the only prompt. The next day I returned to this conversation and switching to it, loading the conversation took closer to a minute than a second. I'm using the latest version of Edge running on macOS. I was inside corporate network with vpn when returning to the conversation, while when I created it, it was from my private network from home. Network speed is limited to 250Mbps down and 20Mbps up. On vpn I had 190 Mbps down and 19 Mbps up contacting fast.com. Loaded ping was <39 ms and unloaded about 25 ms. The internet speed is obviously not the issue.

Using a private account in a separate window of Edge, copilot is fast as normal.

Maybe you should prevent to many hops and loops of how one can authenticate with microsoft.

It's not the browser.

It's a nonsense excuse because it does the same thing in the windows app as well, and does not cap my system resources.

I agree with your point.
Based on my experience, when Copilot generates code, it tends to cause a significant increase in CPU usage.
Reopening a previous chat session where code was generated often leads to high CPU activity, increased fan noise, and a delay of several minutes before the content is fully displayed.
Even though the generated code—ranging from a few lines to several dozen—was previously visible, it does not appear immediately upon reopening the chat.
It seems to me that Copilot is consuming more system resources than necessary simply to render the code.