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PowerShell 7.3 - Memory Leak When Using Scheduled Tasks to Execute Long-Running Scripts

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 93 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-06
powershell scheduled-tasks memory-leak PowerShell

I'm performance testing and I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I've hit a wall trying to This might be a silly question, but I'm experiencing a memory leak when executing a long-running PowerShell script through a scheduled task... The script is designed to process large datasets and make multiple API calls. After running the script for several hours, I notice that the memory consumption keeps increasing significantly, leading to performance degradation and eventually causing the task to unexpected result with an `OutOfMemoryException`. Hereโ€™s a simplified version of my script: ```powershell $ApiUrl = "https://api.example.com/data" $Data = @() function Get-Data { param ( [int]$Page ) $Response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "$ApiUrl?page=$Page" $Data += $Response } $TotalPages = 100 # Assume we know the total pages for ($i = 1; $i -le $TotalPages; $i++) { Get-Data -Page $i Start-Sleep -Seconds 2 # Throttling API requests } # Process Data $Data | ForEach-Object { # Some processing logic here } # Cleanup $data.Clear() ``` Iโ€™ve added a cleanup step at the end to clear `$Data`, but it doesn't seem to help. I also tried running the script interactively in PowerShell, and while it still increases memory usage, it doesnโ€™t seem to hit the same limits as when run as a scheduled task. I've verified that my scheduled task is configured to run with the highest privileges and is set to run whether the user is logged on or not. Iโ€™m using PowerShell 7.3 on Windows Server 2022. Is there something Iโ€™m missing in how PowerShell manages memory in scheduled tasks, or is there any way to mitigate this scenario? Any suggestions for best practices in scripting that involve long-running processes would be greatly appreciated! For context: I'm using Powershell on Linux. What's the best practice here? I'm using Powershell 3.11 in this project. Am I approaching this the right way? I'm developing on Debian with Powershell. Any feedback is welcome! I'd really appreciate any guidance on this. I'm using Powershell stable in this project. How would you solve this?