Pills: Invoke-WebRequest really Slow

If you use Invoke-WebRequest cmdlet in PowerShell to download big binary files, it is sometimes much slower that downloading from a browser.

There are times when using Invoke-WebRequest in PowerShell is really slow, especially compared to a direct download in a browser. The answer is as always on StackOverflow in this post but for some reason approved answer is not my favorite.

Approved solution uses WebClient, it is perfectly valid, but other answer are more correct (and have more votes). In my opinion the real solution is disabling progress.

$ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'

This usually is enough to speedup Invoke-WebRequest without changing every single call to use WebClient.

Gian Maria.