PowerPoint memory leak - Application becomes slower while editing

Gunderz 175

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.

Gunderz 175 Reputation points

2023-02-06T23:22:24.2866667+00:00

*Edit: I am reliably informed by fellow PowerPoint designers this is also occurring on the mac version of PowerPoint.
Emily Hua-MSFT 27,651 Reputation points

2023-02-07T07:23:55.1933333+00:00

Hi @Gunderz

Please make sure Intel Graphics driver is updated to version 31.0.101.3889 or newer.
C smith 10 Reputation points

2023-02-07T15:24:39.5333333+00:00

I've had the same issue with my hi-spec laptop (32gb Ram Nvidia RTX 3070) :(
Gunderz 175 Reputation points

2023-02-07T21:02:04.05+00:00

@Emily Hua-MSFT my machine is updated with all the latest drivers. This is not a graphic driver problem. This is a genuine problem with PowerPoint that needs to be addressed and we need more help than just the suggestion of an Intel driver update. We pay a lot of money for Office 365 and PowerPoint is our livelihood. As you can see from the amount of people that have clicked / said they have the same question and having the same issues this is clearly a very recognised and frustrating problem. My colleagues have all different types of high-spec machines from Apple and different manufacturer PCs - this problem is very real and needs to be properly resolved.
Emily Hua-MSFT 27,651 Reputation points

2023-02-09T08:59:42.2933333+00:00

Hi @Gunderz

Thanks for your details and sorry for the inconvenience.

For this issue, I suggest you open a support ticket with Microsoft Support to help review your problem and help you test remotely, they may collect some dump files or logs for better anaylsis.
Mike Dhonau 25 Reputation points

2023-10-29T10:31:48.8733333+00:00

Powerpoint is becoming almost unusable for be because of this issue. ALL my presentations are large complex ones and this happens every time I edit one of them. If only Microsoft had the resources of a large professional oranisation to draw on they could doubtless fix this in a moment...
Mike Dhonau 25 Reputation points

2023-10-29T10:35:09.69+00:00

It is not just in presentation mode. It happens when editing. Eventually if you type a character, it can take a second for the charater to appear. I'm using a workstation with a Ryzen 9 12 core processor, 128GB RAM and a high spec Nvidea graphics card. My presentations do not have any looping videos, but they are relatively large and complex graphics-wise.
Michael Silver 5 Reputation points

2024-01-13T19:32:58.54+00:00

I, too, work with PowerPoint (Mac, latest versions of everything), and this makes me crazy. I constantly have to close and re-open my files so that I can edit and especially so the animations during the presentation are smooth. Otherwise, they are very jerky and editing can be difficult. It would be great if PowerPoint would at least flush whatever cache or other reason for this problem automatically before starting a presentation each time (and maybe periodically during editing).
JHM 0 Reputation points

2024-01-19T16:20:20.1833333+00:00

I'm seeing that the memory usage in task manager consistently increases specifically when the animation pane is in use. I can run slides with 100 animations without an increase --until I open the animation pane. At that point, the memory usage constantly increases and every animation during a show is bogged down and laggy. The only recourse is to restart PowerPoint. HELP! The program is literally our livelihood!
James Wagstaff 31 Reputation points

2024-07-12T10:06:23.65+00:00

I just experienced Powerpoint refusing to play videos in a live show. Not good. PPT starts at around 400MB memory usage but memory keeps creeping up and videos stop playing at around 750MB. I have 8GB of VRAM on a GTX1080 and 32GB of RAM on the PC - 750MB is nothing. What's going on here please?
Oliver 0 Reputation points

2024-09-10T15:41:53.2066667+00:00

Hi @Gunderz , did you end up finding a solution for this? I have the exact same problem.

8 answers

Info 0 Reputation points

2024-09-01T18:52:27.29+00:00

I have the same problem. Except I experience it only in presentation mode. I use a lot of animations and transitions. PowerPoint does great upon the start of the presentation. But after about 3 slides it slows down and the animations become jerky. Very disappointing! I have not experienced a crash.

Microsoft, please fix this. PowerPoint is a very commonly used tool.
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Simon Baldwin 1 Reputation point

2024-10-15T21:11:35.0033333+00:00

We are experiencing this issue on a Mac running Mac OS Sonoma with 32GB of RAM. It is getting to the point where the Mac is exhausting all the 32GB of RAM and then the Swap! On Activity monitor, I saw Powerpoint using 96GB of RAM. This is just editing large powerpoints with lots of music and video added. Surely this can be fixed? Asking us to contact support etc. is just insulting, there is an issue with the software that needs to be fixed. Thank you for the Keynote suggestion, will try that...
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r2xman 0 Reputation points

2024-11-10T01:03:36.8333333+00:00

With the latest updates (Sequoia, OS 15.1, and Powerpoint 16.90.2 (24102719), this memory leak problem with Powerpoint appears to be fixed.

(I did a wipe of my hard drive, and a brand new install, for some other problems, recently, maybe that had something to do with it).

16 inch MacBook Pro, M2 Max, 32 GB RAM.
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PowerPoint memory leak - Application becomes slower while editing

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