Should Write-Debug statements be left in production PowerShell code?

Question

This is one of my functions I have in a module:

Function Get-DatabaseUser { [CmdletBinding()] Param() Write-Verbose 'Getting database...' $Database = Get-Database Write-Debug('Value of $Database: {0}' -f $Database) if($Database -eq $null) { $ErrorRecord = New-ErrorRecord "Database could not be accessed." NullReferenceException 'DatabaseInaccessible' ObjectNotFound $PSCmdlet.ThrowTerminatingError($ErrorRecord) } Write-Verbose 'Refreshing user list...' $Database.Users.Refresh() Write-Verbose 'Getting user list...' $Users = $Database.Users | Where-Object { $_.LoginType -eq 'WindowsUser' } | Select-Object -Property Name, Login Write-Debug("Number of users: {0}" -f $Users.Count) Write-Verbose 'Writing user list to output...' Write-Output($Users) } 

Is there any reason to keep the Write-Debug statements in my production code, or could these statements be replaced with Write-Verbose? For example, replacing

Write-Debug("Number of users: {0}" -f $Users.Count) 

with

Write-Verbose '3 users found.' 

I'm not sure about the internals of PowerShell and if Write-Debug generates any significant overhead, but I'm still wondering if this has any place in a script used in production or purely for debug versions of my scripts/modules.

Answer 1

I cannot imagine that Write-Debug adds any significant overhead to a PowerShell script. Even if it did does it matter? I do not typically write scripts for performance critical operations - usually I am just trying to automate some mundane task that I am tired of doing manually. It is not going to be the end of the world if I do not squeeze every last ounce of performance out of one of my scripts.

Personally, I leave all my Write-Debug statements in my production scripts. The information that I report with Write-Debug tends to be of a different nature than the information I report with Write-Verbose so I would not want to mash the two together.