Is my PowerShell script inefficient?

Question

I wrote a script to delete temporary files/folders older than 90 days on remote servers. The server.txt file is loaded with Get-Content, and I use 'net use' to map to the IPC$ share. I'm worried that I'm not using Best Practices to delete the old temp files. Here is the meat of my script:

net use \\$server\IPC$ /user:$Authname $pw /persistent:yes
Get-ChildItem -Path "\\$($server)\C$\Temp" -Recurse | Where-Object {!$_.PSIsContainer -and $_.LastAccessTime -lt $cutoffdate} | Remove-Item -Recurse
(Get-ChildItem -Path "\\$($server)\C$\Temp" -recurse | Where-Object {$_.PSIsContainer -eq $True}) | Where-Object {$_.GetFiles().Count -eq 0} | Remove-Item -Recurse
net use \\$Server\IPC$ /delete

The first gci deletes old files, the second deletes empty folders.

The reason I'm concerned is that in my initial tests, it's taking about a half hour to delete approximately 4 gb off of one server. And I work in a big shop; my script needs to be run against about 10,000 servers. At that rate my script won't be done for more than six months, and I was hoping to run it on a quarterly basis.

Am I doing something the hard way?

If at all possible I would run the script in a remote session on each server. Then you could run it as jobs for each server, and run them all at the same time. — TheMadTechnician
– TheMadTechnician, Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 18:19
If you update to ps 4 you can use the -file and -container switches of GCI which filter much much faster than piping the objects to where, even with the remaining where being necessary. Also on the first GCI I don't believe -recurse would be necessary for remove-item. — Noah Sparks
– Noah Sparks, Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 18:22
Is this pretty much exactly what the powershell job abstraction exists for? — Greg D
– Greg D, Commented Sep 24, 2015 at 19:29

Jimbo · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-24 18:32:45Z

2

get a list of your servers
cycle through the list and use invoke-command -computername
your command will be executed on the remote server rather than pulling all the data across the network which is very slow

answered Sep 24, 2015 at 18:32

Jimbo

2,53719 silver badges22 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

campbell.rw Over a year ago

I agree, from experience, all those extra calls across the network are almost certainly your bottleneck.

Jimbo Over a year ago

also, invoke-command can accept multiple computer names and will parallelize the task for you

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Is my PowerShell script inefficient?

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related