Use of simultaneous processing using PowerShell threads

If a long script has to perform many tasks, this can take a lot of time in PowerShell. As PowerShell is not multithreaded by nature and processes are always executed sequentially, so-called threads can be used to minimise the script length.

Example Code

This code serves as a template for the parallel execution of processes. The tricky part with threads is the handling of input parameters and output values.

The script part is defined in the $Scriptblock variable. There you can work with arguments that are passed to the thread. They can be used with the $args variable and the element number. Values can be returned using the keyword "return".

$Scriptblock = {
        Start-Sleep 5
        return $args[0]
}

$MaxThreads = 10
$RunspacePool = [runspacefactory]::CreateRunspacePool(1, $MaxThreads)
$RunspacePool.Open()

$Jobs = @()
$InputObjects = @(
        "<yourinputobject1>",
        "<yourinputobject2>",
        "<yourinputobject3>",
        "<yourinputobject4>",
        "<yourinputobject5>"
)
$OutputObjects = @()

foreach ($Object in $InputObjects) {
        $Instance = [powershell]::Create()
        $Instance.RunspacePool = $RunspacePool
        $Instance.AddScript($ScriptBlock).AddArgument($Object) | Out-Null
        $Jobs += New-Object PSObject -Property @{
                Instance = $Instance
                State    = $Instance.BeginInvoke()
        }
                
}
while ($Jobs.State.IsCompleted -contains $false) {
        Start-Sleep 1
}
foreach ($job in $jobs) {
        $OutputObjects += $job.Instance.EndInvoke($job.State) 
}

$Instance.Dispose()