Parallel SharePoint Tasks with PowerShell

Today I was working on a deployment for a client which entailed activating a custom SharePoint Feature on about 1000 Site Collections. This Feature did a fair number of things and on average it takes about 10-15 minutes to complete in their test environment (which is pretty slow compared to their production environment which I’ve not yet deployed to but I expect close to a 5 minute run time per Site Collection once I go to production with it). You can obviously do the math and quickly see that it will take me somewhere around 10 days for this to complete if I did one Site Collection at a time. This is just unacceptable as I personally don’t want to be monitoring a Feature activation script for that long. What’s worse is that when I look at CPU and memory utilization on the servers I can see that they have plenty of resources so it’s not like the operation is actually taxing the system, they’re just slow operations. So the solution, for me, is pretty obvious: I need to activate these Features in parallel. Continue reading →

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