[kichik]

Invoke-WebRequest is also very slow if you forget to disable the progress bar with $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

PowerShell has some "interesting" design choices...

[Lariscus]

It also buffers the downloaded data completely into memory last time I checked. So downloading a file bigger than the available RAM just doesn't work and you have to use WebClient instead.

Another fun one is Extract-Archive which is painfully slow while using the System.IO.Compression.ZipFile CLR type directly is reasonably fast. Powershell is really a head scratcher sometimes.

[jeroenhd]

The download being cached in RAM kind of makes sense, curl will do the same (up to a point) if the output stream is slower than the download itself. For a scripting language, I think it makes sense. Microsoft deciding to alias wget to Invoke-WebRequest does make for a rather annoying side effect, but perhaps it was to be expected as all of their aliases for GNU tools are poor replacements.

I tried to look into the whole Expand-Archive thing, but as of https://github.com/PowerShell/Microsoft.PowerShell.Archive/c... I can't even find the Expand-Archive cmdlet source code anymore. The archive files themselves seem to have "expand" be unimplemented. Unless they moved the expand command to another repo for some reason, it looks like the entire command will disappear at one point?

Still, it does look like Expand-Archive was using the plain old System.IO.Compression library for its file I/O, though, although there is a bit of pre-processing to validate paths existing and such, that may take a while.

[AHTERIX5000]

Yep. And 'wget' is often alias for WebRequest in PowerShell. The amount of footguns I ran into while trying to get a simple Windows Container CI job running, oh man

[DHowett]

tar.exe, however, beats both of those in terms of archive format support and speed.

[orthoxerox]

Wasn't something like npm much slower as well when it showed a progress indicator by default?

[coffeeaddict1]

I think that's only an issue with Windows Powershell. Powershell 7 works just fine.

[archi42]

This is atrocious. I get it, some things are less trivial than they seem - but I would be ashamed for shipping something like this, and even more for not fixing it.

[Almondsetat]

Came here to post this, and it's even more egregious when you realize curl is an alias for Invoke-WebRequest