Progress bar can significantly impact cmdlet performance

Repro Steps :

Compare perf of WebClient, BITS and Invoke-WebRequest:

Measure-Command { $wc = New-Object System.Net.WebClient; $wc.DownloadFile("https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/archive/master.zip", "C:\Users\crispop\Desktop\master.zip") }


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 3
Milliseconds      : 992
Ticks             : 39928426
TotalDays         : 4.62134560185185E-05
TotalHours        : 0.00110912294444444
TotalMinutes      : 0.0665473766666667
TotalSeconds      : 3.9928426
TotalMilliseconds : 3992.8426
Vs

Measure-Command { Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/archive/master.zip" -OutFile "C:\Users\crispop\Desktop\master.zip" }


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 50
Milliseconds      : 821
Ticks             : 508212825
TotalDays         : 0.000588209288194444
TotalHours        : 0.0141170229166667
TotalMinutes      : 0.847021375
TotalSeconds      : 50.8212825
TotalMilliseconds : 50821.2825

Vs

Measure-Command { Start-BitsTransfer -Source "https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/archive/master.zip" -Destination "C:\Users\crispop\Desktop\masterBits2.zip" }


Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 4
Milliseconds      : 506
Ticks             : 45062594
TotalDays         : 5.21557800925926E-05
TotalHours        : 0.00125173872222222
TotalMinutes      : 0.0751043233333333
TotalSeconds      : 4.5062594
TotalMilliseconds : 4506.2594

Expected: Transfer speeds don't differ too much (maybe Invoke-WebRequest should be a bit faster than BITS which performs the transfer in background.)

Actual: 10x slowdown for Invoke-WebRequest

How can you be sure that it's the progress bar? With $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue', you can suppress the progress bar UI, which will surely boost Invoke-WebRequest. Also, use -UseBasicParsing when downloading files with iwr (which you shouldn't do since that's not what iwr is for...). You cannot suppress parsing, but you can suppress DOM parsing.

Moreover, I did your tests and found that the standard deviation is rather great (poor network here in China).

Please do observe Task Manager for the network speed and also do more statistics. If the network is perfect (I hosted a file locally and tried to download via localhost, all three were superfast even the file is 80MB+, with progress bar suppressed.)

And, could you include the $PSVersionTable?

PSEdition Core
CLRVersion
PSCompatibleVersions {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion 3.0.0.0
GitCommitId v6.0.0-alpha.9
PSRemotingProtocolVersion 2.3
PSVersion 6.0.0-alpha
WSManStackVersion 3.0
SerializationVersion 1.1.0.1

Steve Lee (@SteveL-MSFT)

I also see the progress bar slowing down Invoke-WebRequest by >50X on a fast internet connection. Every time I write a script that uses Invoke-WebRequest I need to include code to temporarily change $ProgressPreference, then restore it later (because I do want progress for other things).

Here's my output from using Invoke-WebRequest to download the same file as Steve Lee (@SteveL-MSFT), without and then with progress:

PS D:\> $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
PS D:\> Measure-Command { Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/archive/master.zip" -OutFile "D:\temp\master.zip" }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 0
Seconds           : 6
Milliseconds      : 72
Ticks             : 60729893
TotalDays         : 7.02892280092593E-05
TotalHours        : 0.00168694147222222
TotalMinutes      : 0.101216488333333
TotalSeconds      : 6.0729893
TotalMilliseconds : 6072.9893

PS D:\> $ProgressPreference = 'Continue'
PS D:\> Measure-Command { Invoke-WebRequest "https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/archive/master.zip" -OutFile "D:\temp\master2.zip" }

Days              : 0
Hours             : 0
Minutes           : 6
Seconds           : 11
Milliseconds      : 664
Ticks             : 3716642777
TotalDays         : 0.00430166988078704
TotalHours        : 0.103240077138889
TotalMinutes      : 6.19440462833333
TotalSeconds      : 371.6642777
TotalMilliseconds : 371664.2777

PS D:\> $PSVersionTable

Name                           Value
----                           -----
PSVersion                      5.1.14931.1000
PSEdition                      Desktop
PSCompatibleVersions           {1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0...}
BuildVersion                   10.0.14931.1000
CLRVersion                     4.0.30319.42000
WSManStackVersion              3.0
PSRemotingProtocolVersion      2.3
SerializationVersion           1.1.0.1

It would be nice to be able to have reasonable progress when downloading a file. Perhaps if there were a way to adjust the progress reporting interval to several KB instead of every byte (!!) then the overhead wouldn't be so bad.

This issue also affects Expand-Archive. For a large archive (10 MB with 3495 files), expanding it takes over 4X long with progress compared to without.

Changed title to be a generic issue with the progress bar.

Yeah, this is pretty bad ...

  Duration CommandLine
  -------- -----------
0.0356085s 1..1e3 | % { $null }
0.7734768s 1..1e3 | % { Write-Host "..." }
4.8700151s 1..1e3 | % { Write-Progress "..." }
0.0040193s $ProgressPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
0.0573198s 1..1e3 | % { Write-Progress "..." }

I remember noticing how much of a blocker progress writing was when I wrote the PSCX GAC provider back in 2007:

            foreach (AssemblyName name in Fusion.GetAssemblies(_type))
            {
                ++i;

                if (i % 5 == 0)
                {
                    WriteProgress(name.Name);
                }

https://github.com/Pscx/Pscx/blob/master/Src/Pscx/Providers/AssemblyCache/AssemblyNameCache.cs#L79

We decided to only write a record on every fifth iteration.

It's very simple (write a record on every fifth iteration). 👍 Just seems the compromise is not always the optimal.
May be possible to write asynchronously every 3-5 seconds?

Ilya (@iSazonov)

Ilya (@iSazonov) Yeah. I'm just saying that it's a problem that's been there since the beginning. Skipping records doesn't solve all issues.

Oisin Grehan (@oising)

Oisin Grehan (@oising) This is not a criticism from me. I just asked your opinion on "async" since you have experience with the problem.

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren)

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren) Thanks for your comment!
ISE is not in the PowerShell Core repo, it is not ported and no plans is.

Yes, my point was, that "powershell for windows" (v4.0) has the same problem, When run under ISE the "console" does not slow down the performance, I thought it might be interesting for those with access to ISE to check what they do. Either way, the solution discussed here helped and I am happy =)

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren)

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren) Welcome to test PowerShell Core Beta.4! We have some console fixes in last time from Jason Shirk (@lzybkr) so you may be surprised how much the console is faster. Also we wait a feedback for loading and using Windows PowerShell modules in PowerShell Core Beta.4.

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren)

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren) the long and short of it is that rendering progress bars in WPF is orders of magnitude fast than drawing progress bars in the windows console. It's not about the code path per-se.

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren)

Niclas Lindgren (@NiclasLindgren) haven't peeked at the ISE code, but I suspect the progress bar is being rendered on a separate thread while the console uses the same thread

Suppress progress bars whenever Invoke-WebRequest is used to workaround

Rollup merge of rust-lang#61304 - lzybkr:iwr_progress, r=alexcrichton

Disable the progress bar while downloading in the Windows wrapper scr…

PowerShellForGitHub: Disable Progress Bar for Invoke-WebRequest (#229)

Hello folks!
I'm very sorry for digging up this old issue again, but I had to notice it still seem to be unresolved 6 years later.

I ran my test using Invoke-WebRequest to download a bigger file. With no additional flags or settings, the download speed gets limited to 2-3 MBit/s on my machine - compared to 100 MBit/s+ without the progress bar. This was tested in the stock powershell console delivered with the latest Win11 22H2 update (PSVersion: 5.1.22621.169).

As I read above, there is, or used to be a fix. Is it still there?

Flo (@max06)

Flo (@max06) this has already been fixed in PowerShell. Windows PowerShell most likely will never get that fix.

You can get around it on Windows PowerShell by using setting https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.core/about/about_preference_variables?view=powershell-7.2#progresspreference to SilentlyContinue.

Thomas Nieto (@ThomasNieto)

Thomas Nieto (@ThomasNieto) Thank you for your quick response!

So, Windows Powershell is different from this one? I never knew that 😲

I'm also not using PS very often, a colleague reported this issue while setting up a new server - I'll forward your hint to him.

Progress bar can significantly impact cmdlet performance

Stop paying the PowerShell 5.x progress-bar tax on large downloads

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Progress bar can significantly impact cmdlet performance #2138

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GeeLaw commented on Aug 31, 2016

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oising commented on Oct 18, 2016

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