[gouranga]

CreateProcess is only being called once in this case i.e. to spawn svnadmin. The exact script does the following:

   svnadmin dump d:\repo > repo.dump

The output from svnadmin has a lot of lines. Due to the fact that PS is written on top of the CLR, it reads each line into an immutable string before writing it to a file. So for every line it has to create a new System.String object and as another poster said GC it later. Also as lines are not predictable length it has to buffer them resulting in more overhead.

Effectively where *NIX shells use a fixed size buffer for pipe operations and operate on streams, PS has to convert it to lines first before writing it out.

That doesn't work when you have approximately 25 bytes per line and a 12Gb file which is where the issue is.

[shortlived]

I can appreciate the technical explanation as a programmer, but as an end-user of PS: I don't care. It's slow.

[gouranga]

For the majority of tasks it's fast enough. There are a few edge cases though.

[DeepDuh]

That's when doing it the Enterprisey way bites you in the ass..

[gouranga]

I don't understand your comment. There's nothing enterprisey about it.

[DeepDuh]

I mean that from Microsoft's perspective. They apparently decided to put an object around something as simple and essential to performance as a line buffer. That's when you should have hired a system programmer to do that job.

Don't get me wrong, I actually like their approach in developing an OO-shell - but if it hurts performance that much someone has taken that paradigm too far. It's the typical case of someone with a hammer (OO programmer) trying to approach everything like it were nails.

[gouranga]

That's a fair evaluation and one I agree with entirely.