PowerPoint memory leak - Application becomes slower while editing

Question

For the last 6 months I have been experiencing PowerPoint getting slower and slower while editing (complex) presentations. I work in the live events industry and this happens on all PC's. - All of my self employed colleagues that create advanced PowerPoint presentations are experiencing EXACTLY the same. - We all have very high end machines with Nvidia RTX3080 graphics cards if not quicker, i9 processors, 32gb+ of RAM, SSD drives etc.

PowerPoint on startup is as quick as you would expect it to be on these powerful machines. Then after a period of editing (nothing paticular) - from inserting videos, editing SVGS, editing in the animation pane, PowerPoint becomes more and more unresponsive and slow until you get to the point of it crashing - the application fades, the circle of death cursor appears and it has to restart (recovering your work if you're lucky)

The only way to rectify this problem if you want to be productive is to continuously restart PowerPoint and then it's back to a fast performance before it happens again.

This what I suspect to be a memory leak also happens to us all when in show mode. - If there is a looping video in the background of multiple slides for example (however big it is - i.e a 5mb looping WMV or MP4) it eventually stops playing when in slide show which is the first sign of PowerPoint crashing imminently. This being during a live show, We have to swap machines to the backup PC onto the same slide with nobody noticing and then exit the slideshow and start it again to get the videos to play again. If you don't do this and don't take the videos stopping as a warning, PowerPoint eventually becomes irresponsive in the middle of a live show.

Please sort this out Microsoft. These machines are capable of playing the latest advanced computer games and rendering videos in After Effects etc. Yet PowerPoint is apparently using up all system resources (and apparently not releasing them until you restart it) - and crippling our machines with even simple slides that have under 10mb of content on them.

Answer 1

Has this been resolved?

I am currently experiencing the same issue with my AMD Ryzen system. Whenever I'm working on a lot of animations within a slide, PowerPoint starts to slow down, regardless of CPU and memory usage. In some cases, it would crash leading to loss of progress.

Answer 2

Don't change to a Mac, I have replicated the same problem on an M1, and M3. Its a memory leak caused by animations, specifically copying the objects.

To replicte the issue I find this works

1. Create a text box (RAM used: 400MB)
2. Add an animation to the box (RAM used: 410MB)
3. Edit the box (RAM Used: 400MB)
4. Copy the box (RAM Used: 780MB)
5. Copy the box (RAM Used: 1.2GB)
6. Copy the box (RAM Used: 2.1 GB)
   ..... Often the memory will continue to increase for another 2-3GB without doing anything at all.....

Its garbage......

Answer 3

Same issue.
MAC M1 Processor

Running MAcOS

Memory of Powerpoint is 400MB until I open the animation pane and add a couple of animations, then it increase by 1000MB!

This is absolute crap, FFS MS sort this out.

Answer 4

I’m experiencing the same problem. My presentations are filled with diagrams built in ppt (not other program). In addition, it is fully loaded with mathematical equations edited in MathType.

I just got a.new machine with 24 core,and the problem still presents!

Is there suggested solution?

Answer 5

This has been a problem for years with PowerPoint. Microsoft has done nothing to fix it. Solution is to buy a Mac and use Keynote.