PowerShell COM Performance Improved in Windows Server Technical Preview

I was browsing some of my favorite blogs and came across a post by my buddy, David Stein. David writes the Skatterbrainz Blog and always provides some awesome, thoughtful, and frequently humorous content. He has an interesting way of looking at the IT profession.

In a recent post, David pit VBScript against PowerShell in a performance test and VBScript won out. There's no question that PowerShell is the much more powerful (pun intended) scripting language, but to see VBScript outperform PowerShell as much as 22 times faster makes you think.

A subsequent discussion on the matter over Twitter brought a recommendation for the PowerShell version that is included in the Windows Server Technical Preview out now. Lee Holmes, a Principal Software Design Engineer for PowerShell at Microsoft, suggested that COM performance has been improved significantly in the Technical Preview. And, sure enough, when you dig into the "What's New in Windows PowerShell 5.0" document, it does say…

Windows PowerShell 5.0 includes a new COM implementation, which offers significant performance improvements when you are working with COM objects.

If you've not downloaded the Technical Preview for Windows Server yet, you can find all the links and info here:

Downloads and Azure Images for System Center and Windows Server Technical Previews Now Live

I now have something good to test other than the new Windows Server features, and I've sent a note off to David so he can test, too.

Here's a quick demo of the COM performance improvements:

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