Powershell - Why is Using Invoke-WebRequest Much Slower Than a Browser Download?

Question

I use Powershell's Invoke-WebRequest method to download a file from Amazon S3 to my Windows EC2 instance.

If I download the file using Chrome, I am able to download a 200 MB file in 5 seconds. The same download in PowerShell using Invoke-WebRequest takes up to 5 minutes.

Why is using Invoke-WebRequest slower and is there a way to download at full speed in a PowerShell script?

Answer 1

Without switching away from Invoke-WebRequest, turning off the progress bar did it for me. I found the answer from this thread: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/issues/2138 (jasongin commented on Oct 3, 2016)

$ProgressPreference = 'SilentlyContinue'
Invoke-WebRequest <params>

For my 5MB file on localhost, the download time went from 30s to 250ms.

Note that to get the progress bar back in the active shell, you need to call $ProgressPreference = 'Continue'.

Answer 2

I was using

Invoke-WebRequest $video_url -OutFile $local_video_url

I changed the above to

$wc = New-Object net.webclient
$wc.Downloadfile($video_url, $local_video_url)

This restored the download speed to what I was seeing in my browsers.