OneNote 2016 slow performance, high CPU usage when displaying/manipulating tables

Question

I recently upgraded my desktop office installations from Office 2013 (standalone) to 2016 (Office 365 subscription). I noticed immediately that OneNote 2016 is much slower than 2013.

I spent time troubleshooting and tested OneNote 2016 on every computer in our organisation, they all exhibit the same problem. I also installed 2013 (Office 365 subscription) and do not experience the same problem.

The problem can easily be recreated with a new, blank notebook by creating the largest table possible with the insert table menu (25x25). I often work with tables larger than this and the problem gets progressively worse as the table gets bigger.

After creating a large table, open the task manager and you will immediately notice that OneNote (being an un-threaded application) uses a very large percentage of the CPU it has affinity for. If the table is multiple pages, you will see the usage on that single core hit 100% if you scroll the page, and again if you attempt to manipulate the size of the table. You will also notice high or 100% usage if you change from a blank or text only page to the page containing the table accompanied by a large delay.

To illustrate how bad this problem is, if you compare my fire breathing, 8C/16T 4.2Ghz gaming PC with Onenote 2016 to my paltry 2C/4T 2Ghz laptop running OneNote 2013, the laptop runs circles around the desktop.

Again, this problem does not exist in OneNote 2013. Changing pages and manipulating large tables is instantaneous. I also believe this issue is occasionally causing OneNote 2016 to crash and I believe it is the root cause of the OneNote 2016 slowness complaints that permeate the internet.

 I checked the logs on OneNote 2016 and noticed that it is constantly trying to access bizarre, non-existent keys in the registry with names like "ExperimentDogfood" "New Key#1" and "(Default)" etc in the following location: 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Common

and 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Common*ExperimentDogfood*

Adding the keys to the registry makes no difference. It is definitely unique to OneNote 2016, 2013 does not look for those keys at all.

I have observed Process Monitor on my laptop (Windows 10, Office 2013) and my work PC (Windows 10, Office 2016) and the only other thing I'm seeing occasionally is "Buffer too small" which OneNote 2013 does not do at all. It appears immediately when switching to a page with a table. It only refers to "HKLM" and appears multiple times.

I also see "BUFFER OVERFLOW" for "HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0000\UMD"

I did see a buffer overflow in OneNote 2013 however it was in relation to a font file.

Other people are experiencing the same problem:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/e8f78275-58a7-43e7-9993-dcf20c7cb320/onenote-2016-slow-performance-high-cpu-usage-when-displayingmanipulating-tables?forum=Office2016ITPro

Answer 1

I'm getting this as well, excluding the notebooks from antivirus didn't do anything and then when I tried going to control panel>programs>Microsoft Office 2016, selecting Change and then Online repair, it re-installed all of Office from my PC which did fix it, mostly. The main problem page has a table with 6 by about 200-300 cells, previously lagging massively by just having it open and trying to do anything. Now it still lags when loading the page, same with other pages I have smaller but still quite large tables, but doesn't lag while editing or anything. Which is reasonable, it's been that way since I made those tables and it's the case for large printouts and such too.

Answer 2

Since I originally posted this issue, it appears that Microsoft has implemented multi-threading in Onenote. This has improved the performance, but the issue still persists. Even with multi-threading, Onenote 2016 is still slower than 2013 which is single threaded.

Answer 3

Hi Rick,

This can be an issue with the storage/memory, compatibility or within the OneNote application itself. However, for us to properly isolate what is causing this, we just need to confirm some information. Please answer the following:

• When did you first encounter this issue?
• Is the issue specific to a OneNote file or with all OneNote files?
• Were you able to perform the troubleshooting steps provided on this thread?

Meanwhile, we suggest that you disable Hardware Acceleration in OneNote and check if it helps:

1. Click the File tab.
2. Click on Options. Click on Advancedtab.
3. Under Display, select the Disable hardware graphics accelerationcheck box.
4. Click Ok and verify the results.

Please try the suggested steps and let us know the result.

Thank you.

Answer 4

This is a pervasive and obvious problem. Entirely reproducible. We have several large tables on pages in OneNote 2016 and across a variety of powerful machines, it can take anywhere from several seconds to a minute just to switch to such a page. Changing a column width on such a page is glacially slow, as we watch OneNote display one character at a time as the column width changes, with about 5 seconds between each character typed.

This is on Dell, Lenovo, Surface machines on OneNote 2016 from Office 365 Home Premium and Office 365 Business. It has been present on 1511 and 1607 levels of Windows 10, but also appears on my one lone Win 8.1 system. It happens on machines ranging from a Surface Pro 4 with an i5 processor  up to the very fastest i7 processor available. All systems are using SSDs and have 8 to 32GB of memory. It's not a computer issue. It happens on internet connections ranging from 100mbps down to 350mbps down, and 12mbps up to 25mbps up, so it's not internet speed. Happens in local notebooks too, so it's not syncing, or OneDrive.  These performance issues do not show up in Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook. It's only OneNote, and the performance issue is linear in the size of the table on the page. That is, the larger the table, the larger the problem. On pages with no tables, there is no performance issue. On pages with large tables, it's nearly unbearable. It has been several weeks since this problem was introduced. Prior to that such tables performed well.

Please Microsoft fix this or let us know what we can do, or something!

Cheers,

Don

Answer 5

Thanks Damon,

I have been suspecting tables as causing slowdown in OneNote for the last few weeks too.

I have dozens of users using dozens of notebooks hosted on SharePoint. My users have been reporting to me that OneNote will periodically freeze while they're working in it. They use very large tables, but using an embedded spreadsheet isn't an option. I myself didn't experience this slowdown until I started using larger tables in my own notebook.

However, I am using OneNote 2013 (VL). My own notebook does occasionally get used by a 2016 (365) user, but not often. 

The issue does not appear to be sync related, as I experience it when offline too. Also running a fairly powerful laptop with an PCIe SSD, so I doubt it's a hardware performance issue.

I'll try rolling everyone back to 2013 to see if it fixes it. However, perhaps 2016 OneNote changes the notebook structure slightly and that's why I see the slowdown even in my own 2013?