How to create archive with PowerShell?

The PowerShell 5.0 has features to support ZIP archives – Expand-Archive and Compress-Archive. They are very handy but what about performance?

In my previous post I measured performance of extracting ZIP archive, in this post I will focus on a ZIP archive creation. Again I will compare two ways of creation a ZIP archive – provided by PowerShell and provided by .NET Framework.

The first method is using native PowerShell command Compress-Archive; the second method is using CreateFromDirectory method from System.IO.Compression.Filesystem. The PowerShell code to compress a folder is shown below:

$measureCreate = Measure-Command { 
        Add-Type -assembly System.IO.Compression.Filesystem
        [io.compression.zipfile]::CreateFromDirectory("$folderToArchive", "$archivePath\Create$i.zip", [System.IO.Compression.CompressionLevel]::Optimal, $true )
    }

$measureCompress = Measure-Command {
        $ProgressPreference=’SilentlyContinue’
        Compress-Archive $folderToArchive "$archivePath\Compress$i.zip" -CompressionLevel Optimal
    }

First I compared a size of archives created by these two methods, and size is quite equal so I guess that compression level was the same in both cases.

Shows an archive size comparison for two methods.

The results are the following for around 313MB folder with 25000 of files.

First column – ZIP archive and source folder are on the same disk
Second column – ZIP archive and source folder are on different disks

---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:52
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:52
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:52
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:51

---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:52
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:16
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:51
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:53
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:54
---
CreateFromDirectory 0:17
Compress-Archive     0:52

Conclusions

CreateFromDirectory is much faster then Compress-Archive
There is no difference when source folder for compression and output archive file are on the same disk drive. As we remember from previous post this is important for expanding archive to use two different disks for source and destination.

How can I reproduce your test?

Here is script used by me for performance tests.

	$archivePath = "E:\Test"
	$folderToArchive = "E:\Temp\FolderToCompress"

	# prepare output folder
	mkdir $archivePath –Force
	Clear-Host

	for( $i = 0; $i -lt 10; $i++ )
	{
	$measureExtract = Measure-Command {
	Add-Type –assembly System.IO.Compression.Filesystem
	[io.compression.zipfile]::CreateFromDirectory("$folderToArchive", "$archivePath\Create$i.zip", [System.IO.Compression.CompressionLevel]::Optimal, $true )
	}

	$measureExpand = Measure-Command {
	$ProgressPreference=’SilentlyContinue’
	Compress-Archive $folderToArchive "$archivePath\Compress$i.zip" –CompressionLevel Optimal
	}

	Write-Host "—"
	Write-Host "CreateFromDirectory $($measureExtract.Minutes):$($measureExtract.Seconds)"
	Write-Host "Compress-Archive $($measureExpand.Minutes):$($measureExpand.Seconds)"

	}
	# clean output folder
	rmdir $archivePath –Force –Recurse

view raw create-zip-performance-tests.ps1 hosted with ❤ by GitHub

PowerShell code

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Conclusions

How can I reproduce your test?

Like this:

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