[adiabatty]

On my i5-2400 with 8 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it takes six seconds to start the first time and four seconds to start subsequent times.

On my i5-3550 with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD it takes a couple seconds to start the first time and less than a second for subsequent times.

Both machines are running Windows 10.

Right now, the machine with the spinning rust is loading a bunch of files with an I/O priority of "background" because it just got booted into Windows; that might slow it down a bit because of the seek times and I don't know if Windows is willing to starve background I/O for seconds at a time to speed up interactive requests (I doubt it).

Update: once all the background preloading is done, PowerShell restarts in three seconds on the spinning-rust machine.

Long story short, I think getting an SSD will be the thing that makes PowerShell start acceptably fast.

[JeffreySnover]

We did a lot of work on PowerShell startup in this next release - I think you'll be happy.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

[keithpeter]

Ancient Thinkpad dual-core with 512Mb RAM and 5400 legacy spinning rust disc running OpenBSD 5.9.

Left click in fwvm, select xterm, window appears in less than my blink response time.

Seriously: I think I might pop Win10 on an old Dell i5 that came with Win7 and play with this.

[ljani]

Many thanks for the comparison! I'm indeed with a 7200 RPM disk. I guess I should invest into some new hardware soonish :)