Powershell command Compress-Archive incredibly slow - powershell

Question

I'm new to windows development and I'm attempting using github actions to do a build/deploy. In the build step I compress my project and upload it
jobs:
build:
runs-on: windows-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout#v2
- name: Set up Node.js version
uses: actions/setup-node#v1
with:
node-version: '16.x'
- name: npm install, build, and test
run: |
npm install
npm run build --if-present
npm run test --if-present
- name: Zip contents for upload
shell: powershell
run: |
Compress-Archive -Path . -DestinationPath nextjs-app.zip
- name: Upload artifact for deployment job
uses: actions/upload-artifact#v2
with:
name: nextjs-app
path: nextjs-app.7z
and then in my deploy step I download it, expand it, and then deploy it.
deploy:
runs-on: windows-latest
needs: build
environment:
name: 'Production'
url: ${{ steps.deploy-to-webapp.outputs.webapp-url }}
steps:
- name: Download artifact from build job
uses: actions/download-artifact#v2
with:
name: nextjs-app
- name: Unzip archive file
shell: powershell
run: |
Expand-Archive nextjs-app.zip -DestinationPath .
The issue is that it takes an incredible amount of time to do the compression/expansion. I had previously done this on linux and it took around 2 minutes for compression/expansion, but using powershell it's taking about 15 minutes to compress and 12 minutes to expand. Why are the Compress/Expand commands going so slow? Am I doing something wrong? The expanded folder size is around 200MB

Answer 1

You may experiment with compression parameters, e. g. -CompressionLevel Fastest.
Alternatively use .NET API directly, as Santiago Squarzon suggests. This requires PowerShell (Core) 7+:
[IO.Compression.ZipFile]::CreateFromDirectory( $sourceDirectory, $zipFileName, 'Fastest', $false )
Note that .NET API has a different current directory than PowerShell, so best practice is to pass only absolute paths to .NET API. The simplest way to do this is to prepend $PWD (PowerShell's current directory) to any path, e. g. "$PWD\SomeFile.xyz".