PowerShell is single-threaded and can only do one thing at a time, but by using background jobs, you can spawn multiple PowerShell instances and work simultaneously. Then, you can synchronize them to continue when they all are done:
# starting different jobs (parallel processing) $job1 = Start-Job { Dir $env:windir *.log -Recurse -ea 0 } $job2 = Start-Job { Start-Sleep -Seconds 10 } $job3 = Start-Job { Get-WmiObject Win32_Service } # synchronizing all jobs, waiting for all to be done Wait-Job $job1, $job2, $job3 # receiving all results Receive-Job $job1, $job2, $job3 # cleanup Remove-Job $job1, $job2, $job3
This can speed up logon scripts and other tasks as long as the jobs you send to the background jobs are independent of each other – and take considerable processing time. If your tasks only take a couple of seconds, then sending them to background jobs causes more delay than benefit.
