No, I'm right there with you. Almost all my tasks are I/O bound by local disks, network disks, or some form of network data store. The more I get into PowerShell and begin using complex tasks, the more I find I'm really just writing C# code.

And, yes, generally the easiest path to faster performance is just loading everything into memory and working with it there. In my PDF script I need to validate that the ID numbers are being read are valid, so I pull all 20,000 of them and put them into a HashSet<String>. That's extremely fast to validate with compared to an array and performs a bit better than a HashTable. There are times when I need to use an SqlDataReader or StreamReader and read row by row or line by line (4 GB+ text files suck), but that's only when memory has become a problem.

I've been meaning to really dig into the High Performance PowerShell with LINQ article (https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/dotnet/net-framework/hi...), but I just don't have a need for it at present unless I refactor an existing script and they all work great.