PowerShell tutorial – exploring Start-Sleep CMDLET

Hi All,

Greetings for the day!!! Continuing the PowerShell tutorial

Today exploring one of the important CMDLET – Start-Sleep

Details / Use Case

• In one of the my application I was executing PowerShell script against SharePoint online
• PowerShell script was containing CMDLETs from SharePoint online module and looping through site collections
• Suddenly script started throwing and 429 error – Too Many Requests
• This means we are getting throttled in SharePoint online
• So the CMDLET Start-Sleep came to rescue 🙂

SharePoint Online uses throttling to maintain optimal performance and reliability of the SharePoint Online service. Throttling limits the number of API calls or operations within a time window to prevent overuse of resources

SYNTAX

Start-Sleep -Seconds <int>

Start-Sleep -Milliseconds <int>

• The Start-Sleep cmdlet suspends the activity in a script or session for the specified period of time
• We can use it for many tasks, such as waiting for an operation to complete or pausing before repeating an operation
• In my PowerShell script I used this CMDLET – Start-Sleep in between SharePoint online CMDLETs and 429 error resolved

Demo

• Example 1 – Demonstrating pause of 2 seconds in between two CMDLETs

#getting current time
$currentTime = Get-Date -DisplayHint Time

Write-Host "Current time is - " $currentTime
Write-Host
Write-Host lets wait for 2 seconds
Write-Host

#pausing for 2 seconds
Start-Sleep -Seconds 2

#getting time after 2 seconds
$timeAfter2Secs = Get-Date -DisplayHint Time

Write-Host "After waiting 2 secs time is - " $timeAfter2Secs

Output : 

Current time is -  9/2/2023 11:35:34 PM

lets wait for 2 seconds

After waiting 2 secs time is -  9/2/2023 11:35:36 PM

REFERENCES

• Avoid getting throttled or blocked in SharePoint Online
• Start-Sleep

Thanks for reading! If you think this is useful, kindly please like and share! HAVE a FANTASTIC LEARNING ! LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL 🙂