Invoke-MgGraphRequest -OutputFilePath vs Out-File Performance Comparison

In case you were wondering which is faster.

Invoke-GraphRequest -Uri 'beta/users' -OutputFilePath ./user.json

or

Invoke-GraphRequest -Uri 'beta/users' | Out-File -FilePath ./user.json

Surprisingly, the answer is that Out-File is the fastest

Here’s what I got when I ran the two commands:

Measure-Command { Invoke-GraphRequest -Uri 'beta/users' -OutputFilePath ./user.json }

TotalSeconds      : 3.1084942

Invoke-GraphRequest -Uri 'beta/users' | Out-File -FilePath ./user.json

TotalSeconds      : 0.5016927

That got me thinking. Does the performance change much when using different output types?

Measure-Command { Invoke-GraphRequest -Uri 'beta/users' -OutputType Json | Out-File ./user.json }

TotalSeconds      : 0.4035508

Here’s what I get when I ran the same command with different output types. There was no clear winner and they all ranged between 0.2 and 0.5 seconds.

OutputType	TotalSeconds
Json	0.4035508
Hashtable	0.3948994
PSObject	0.4495978
HttpResponseMessage	0.5539832