Microsoft has acknowledged a significant issue with its Teams application, particularly regarding memory consumption. Users have reported that even when idle, the app can consume up to 1GB of RAM on Windows 10 and 11 systems. This problem becomes even more pronounced during meetings, where users experience audio interruptions and video lag due to excessive resource usage.
To address these concerns, Microsoft plans to restructure Teams by splitting it into two distinct processes. The main process will continue handling messaging and interface display through ms-teams.exe, while all call-related functionalities will transition to a new sub-process named ms-teams_modulehost.exe. This architectural change aims not only to reduce resource conflicts but also enhance overall stability—ensuring that if one module fails or lags, it won’t affect other functionalities like chat.
Despite this promising update set for rollout in January 2026, skepticism remains within the tech community about whether simply adding a second process is enough to solve the underlying issues tied to WebView2 technology. Critics argue that since Teams operates as a massive web application built on WebView2 rather than native code, high memory usage may persist regardless of structural changes.
WebView2 itself allows developers to embed web technologies directly into applications using Microsoft Edge as the rendering engine. While this offers benefits such as improved performance monitoring compared to Electron (another framework previously used by Teams), it still raises questions about efficiency when managing extensive multimedia content like audio and video calls.
Interestingly, similar challenges were observed with WhatsApp after transitioning from native UWP codebase solutions towards Chromium-based frameworks like WebView2; their memory consumption reportedly surged sevenfold post-transition.
As Microsoft pushes forward with these updates aimed at improving user experience without altering existing layouts significantly, organizations are advised to adjust antivirus settings accordingly so they don’t mistakenly block new processes introduced in this dual-architecture approach.