👀 Views: 0 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-12

powershell csv performance PowerShell

I tried several approaches but none seem to work... I'm working with important performance optimization when trying to import large CSV files using `Import-Csv` in PowerShell 7.3. My CSV files can be upwards of 500MB, and when I attempt to import them, the process consumes a lot of memory and eventually throws an `OutOfMemoryException`. I've tried running my script on a machine with 32GB of RAM, but it still fails after processing about 30% of the file. Here’s the code I’m using: ```powershell $csvFilePath = 'C:\data\largefile.csv' $data = Import-Csv -Path $csvFilePath ``` I considered using a streaming approach to handle the CSV data incrementally, but I’m not sure how to implement that effectively. I tried reading the file line by line using `Get-Content`, but I encountered issues with the fields being parsed correctly. Here’s what I attempted: ```powershell Get-Content -Path $csvFilePath -ReadCount 0 | ForEach-Object { $fields = $_ -split ',' # Assuming CSV is comma-separated # Do something with $fields } ``` This approach does read the file without hitting memory limits, but I lose the benefits of the header mapping that `Import-Csv` provides, making it cumbersome to work with the data afterward. I even tried using `-Encoding UTF8` and other encoding options, but the performance remained poor. Is there a more efficient way to handle large CSV files in PowerShell that retains the ease of use of `Import-Csv`? Any advice on performance optimizations or alternative methods would be greatly appreciated. This is part of a larger web app I'm building. My development environment is macOS. Am I missing something obvious?