Testing PowerShell Script Speed

Words: 414

Time to read: ~ 2 minutes

I would consider myself a passive Twitter user.

Apart from catching up on news during my commute I only really use notifications for a certain number of hashtags i.e. #SqlServer, #tsql2sday, #sqlhelp, and #PowerShell.

So during work, every so often a little notification will pop up on the bottom right of my window and I can quickly glance down and decide whether to ignore it or check it out.

That’s what happened with the following tweet:

Now I’m always trying to improve my knowledge on PowerShell so when this notification pops up I glance down and think to myself:

“Oh I can have that check that out on a side screen while I work away. Maybe I can learn something”

So I join in and watch it.

Man, am I glad I did. I got an insight into Boe Prox’s ( twitter | blog )  PoshRSJob and a look into the method of developing & troubleshooting a script but I also gleaned a nice little way of casting a hash table to a PSCustomObject!

Sometimes you may know that 2 * 2 * 2 * 2 = 16 but it takes seeing it in action to realize it’s the same as 2^4 = 16.

Check it out here:

What’s the point of this post?…

Right! Sorry, sorry, I get sidetracked sometimes.

It’s all well and good to automate aspects of your job but how can you test if they scale? I can now use Start-TestCaseMeasurement to check this out!

See for yourself:

Find-Module -name Start-TestCaseMeasurement | Select-Object -Property Name, Type, Version, Repository, Description

Let’s install it

Find-Module -name Start-TestCaseMeasurement | Install-Module

Right, “Run as Administrator” is needed to install scripts. My bad…

Great! But where did it go to?

Get-InstalledScript Start-TestCaseMeasurement | Select-Object -Property InstalledLocation, Name<code></code>

Testing the test

Now that we have everything that we need, I’d be remiss if I didn’t show you this in action.

So let’s check out the speed of getting the ServerName using Invoke-Sqlcmd, shall we?

. 'C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Scripts\Start-TestCaseMeasurement.ps1' -Scriptblock {
Invoke-Sqlcmd -ServerInstance .\SqlServer2k16 -Database Pantheon -Query "SELECT @@SERVERNAME"
} -Throttle 10 -Iterations 1000

Running this 1,000 times gave us a longest run time of only 35 milliseconds.

Exit:

Adding this to the my internal scripts mean that I can not only create scripts but also ensure that they scale as well!

And it’s still getting improved as well.

What a nice little find 🙂