Copy-Item is 27% slower than File Explorer

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.

Invoke-WebRequest is also very slow if you forget to disable the progress bar with $ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

PowerShell has some "interesting" design choices...

Never assume anything done in Powershell is fast.

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.

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.

> 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.