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I've noticed that whenever I'm running Zoom, and particularly (it seems) when a participant is screen sharing, my entire computer is quite laggy. Zoom itself works great - no lag in video, audio, screen sharing. The problem is the rest of Windows is laggy to the point that if I move the mouse around, I can see it freeze and jump all over the place in a very choppy manner.

Naturally, I've checked Task Manager, and I'm seeing that resource consumption (at least, from the perspective of Task Manager) is quite low:

  • 10-20% CPU usage
  • 3.5-4 GB of RAM usage (out of 16 total)

I reduced the CPU Priority of zoom.exe to Low, but this did not appear to help much, if at all. The PC has a mechanical hard drive, but RAM utilization is so low that I don't see how paging could be an issue here. I generally have no issues when not running Zoom.

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Here is my Windows Experience Report: enter image description here

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I don't really expect anyone to be able to explain the actual cause of this lag, and "why is my PC slow?" is a broad and useless question, but how would I go about determining what's causing this? Not by trial and error, preferably, but somehow being able to see what the bottleneck here is. Obviously, the cause is too complex for Task Manager to reveal, and it's not really clear what else could be in play.

The only thing I have noticed is that when Aero is enabled, there is significantly less lag (I usually use a dark Windows Classic Theme). So maybe there is some truth to "Aero makes your PC run faster", but CPU utilization is about the same with Aero enabled / vs. not enabled, and it's not anywhere near high, never above ~20%, so this doesn't make much sense, either.

But I'd like to be able to put a finger on this in a more somewhat analytical way.

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  • What are the specs of your pc? It's hard to tell if even the minimum requirements are met for applications like zoom.
    – CentrixDE
    Nov 2, 2021 at 22:00
  • @CentrixDE I updated the post with the specs from the System page. It's a Dell OptiPlex 980 tower. All the video is through dedicated graphics cards, one DisplayPort, one DVI.
    – InterLinked
    Nov 2, 2021 at 22:24
  • It might be due to the integrated graphics unit. This is responsible for decoding the video. You can check if Zoom has the same problem via the web browser or, if already used, via the client.
    – CentrixDE
    Nov 2, 2021 at 22:41
  • @CentrixDE Integrated (onboard) graphics is disabled, though, since there are external graphic cards installed in the PCI slots. Dell doesn't let you use both at the same time.
    – InterLinked
    Nov 2, 2021 at 23:34
  • You should put the Specs, or the manufacturer and model of your GPU in the question also. Otherwise, you'll get just suggestions based on the information you provided us, which doesn't tell if you have a separate GPU or not.
    – CentrixDE
    Nov 3, 2021 at 7:05

1 Answer 1

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You want to use PerfView in order to spot the bottlenecks in a process without having the code, ie., zoom in your case.

You can do this too with Intel Advisor.

Few suggestions to resolve the lagging:

Open the settings of the Zoom app and change the following settings under the individual sections described:

Video:

  • Change Aspect Ratio from ‘16:9’ to ‘Original’
  • Uncheck ‘Enable HD’
  • Uncheck ‘Mirror my Video’

Uncheck ‘Display up to 49 participants per screen in Gallery View’

Audio:

  • If you have a headset with a good microphone then:
  • Go to Advanced Settings
  • Select ‘Disable’ under the Suppress Persistent Background Noises’

Virtual Background:

  • Disable the use of virtual background if at all possible.
  • While in a call:
  • Make sure to stay in speaker view instead of gallery view. This has the least amount of impact but does make a little bit of difference.

(from rahisystems)

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