👀 Views: 20 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-08

powershell performance filtering PowerShell

I've been researching this but I'm writing unit tests and I'm currently facing performance issues when filtering a large array of custom objects using `Where-Object` in PowerShell 7.3... The array contains over 10,000 objects, each with several properties, and I'm trying to filter these based on multiple complex conditions. My current approach is causing significant slowdowns, and sometimes it even leads to timeouts when executed in a script that needs to run within a limited time frame. Here's a simplified version of my code: ```powershell $objects = @() for ($i = 0; $i -lt 10000; $i++) { $objects += [PSCustomObject]@{ Id = $i; Name = "Item$i"; Status = if ($i % 2 -eq 0) { 'Active' } else { 'Inactive' } Value = Get-Random -Minimum 1 -Maximum 100 } } $filteredResults = $objects | Where-Object { $_.Status -eq 'Active' -and $_.Value -gt 50 } ``` The filtering criteria (`Status -eq 'Active'` and `Value -gt 50`) work fine for smaller datasets, but when I scale up to 10,000+ entries, it becomes noticeably sluggish. I've read that using `Where-Object` can be slow for large collections and that it may be more efficient to use the `Where` method directly on the array. I tried changing my query to: ```powershell $filteredResults = $objects.Where({ $_.Status -eq 'Active' -and $_.Value -gt 50 }) ``` But I noticed no significant improvement in speed. Additionally, I considered using `ForEach-Object`, but that seems counterintuitive as I would still need to build a collection to store my results. Is there a more efficient way to handle filtering large arrays in PowerShell, or perhaps a different strategy for dealing with complex conditions? Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated! I'm using Powershell LTS in this project. Has anyone dealt with something similar? I'd really appreciate any guidance on this.