[HN Gopher] Copy-Item is 27% slower than File Explorer
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Copy-Item is 27% slower than File Explorer
Author : hiAndrewQuinn
Score : 20 points
Date : 2025-12-06 21:55 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (til.andrew-quinn.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (til.andrew-quinn.me)
| DustinEchoes wrote:
| Never assume anything done in Powershell is fast.
| kg wrote:
| > SFTP is an encrypted protocol, so maybe those CPU cycles add up
| to a lot of extra work over time or slowdown. That... shouldn't
| feel convincing to anyone who gives it more than 15 seconds of
| thought, but we all live with our eyes wide shut at times.
|
| FWIW, I previously spent some time trying to get the maximum
| possible throughput when copying files between a Windows host and
| a Linux VM, and the encryption used by most protocols did
| actually become a bottleneck eventually. I expect this isn't a
| big factor on 1gbps ethernet, but I've never measured it.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| ugh, I don't know why copying files and basic I/O is so fucked on
| Windows. Recently I was trying to copy some large movie files
| between 2 folders on an NVME SSD formatted to ExFAT in a good
| USB-C enclosure connected over 20Gbps USB-C port and explorer
| would literally just freeze & crash doing that. I had to copy one
| file at a time to make it not crash, and then it would have this
| weird I/O pattern where the transfer would do almost nothing for
| 1-2 minutes, then the speed eventually picked up.
|
| This isn't even going into WSL. I specifically stopped using WSL
| and moved to a separate linux devbox because of all the weirdness
| and slowness with filesystem access across the WSL boundary.
| Something like listing a lot of files would be very slow IIRC.
| Slightly tangentially, the whole situation around sharing files
| across OSes is pretty frustrating. The only one that works
| without 3rd party paid drivers on all 3 major OSes is ExFAT and
| that is limited in many other ways compared to ext4 or NTFS.
| bakugo wrote:
| Just tried copying a 20GB file to my Windows desktop from a
| mounted Samba share through gigabit ethernet (nvme on both
| sides). Explorer, Copy-Item and robocopy all saturated the
| connection with no issues.
|
| There's definitely something off about OP's setup, though I have
| no idea what it could be. I'd start by checking the latency
| between the machines. Might also be the network adapter or its
| drivers.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| rsync being that much slower makes no sense since back when I
| used windows I rsync was saturating 1 gig easily, this has to
| be running on a very slow pentium or something.
| kichik wrote:
| Invoke-WebRequest is also very slow if you forget to disable the
| progress bar with $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
|
| PowerShell has some "interesting" design choices...
| archi42 wrote:
| 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.
| cheema33 wrote:
| I am not surprised. My Windows 11 systems with modern and beefy
| hardware frequently runs very slow for reasons unknown. I did use
| https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat recently and that seemed
| to have helped. Windows by default comes with a lot of crap that
| most of us do not use but it consumes resources anyway.
|
| I have been considering a move back to Linux. It is only
| Microsoft Teams on Windows that I have to use daily that is
| holding me back.
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(page generated 2025-12-06 23:00 UTC)