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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

MS Teams is by far the worst piece of software I’ve ever used. It is ungodly slow and it just gets slower the more you use it.

I believe it is actually hitting the server to update the online/away status light for every single message in a conversation. If you turn off all the status update stuff in the settings then the software speeds up dramatically. Another thing you can do is find the folder where it caches everything and just trash the entire thing. Somehow, they’ve managed to make caching slow everything down rather than provide a speed up.

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Have you tried ‘New Teams’?

It’s exactly the same but then you can have to open twice and drain your resources much quicker.

And as a bonus, Outlook stops reporting presence!

hmm I use teams daily all day for work and don't have these issues, maybe your org messed something up?

I use it exclusively as a progressive web app on Linux and it's not particularly slow, but it is buggy as all hell. Easily the worst rich text editing experience of any chat client I've ever used. Teams is without a doubt the worst piece of software I'm required to use on a daily basis

It is also possible that you don’t notice the slow downs?

Teams installed directly from the App Store or Microsoft on any device I own (high end windows/mac/ipad) devices are all terribly slow

I have used it at two different orgs (a university and a company) and it had the same issue on both. Perhaps your org has the settings figured out!

Why is that not at least done asynchronously? I thought part of the whole narrative of shipping these new terrible pieces of software as standalone Google Chrome instances was that it makes it easier to spawn async JS workers for background tasks and whatnot?

async is still difficult. There is no getting around data synchronization issues. either you need to spend a lot of time in design or will get constant problems with things like not having a mutex when you should, mutex deadlock, holding a mutex too long, locking/unlocking too often.

I haven't done async JS, but I've done enough async elsewhere to know that language cannot work around bad design.

I thought this was mostly/fully solved with CRDTs?

You still need to design a CRDT that solves your particular problem, you don't just say the magic word "CRDT" and the problem is gone. And the performance will depend on how good the design is.

I think that’s what it’s doing. If you have a conversation with a person spanning hundreds of messages (over many weeks) it’ll be updating the status light next to their name on every single message in the history. The more messages in the history, the more workers you get!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

If you think Teams is bad, then you haven't had to endure Google Chat.

Can't have technical debt if you throw it all away every couple years and start over.

Work started off using Google talk. I am expecting something to replace google chat like they did talk and hangouts.

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