The cost of Write-Debug when you're not debugging

Test-Debug.ps1

function Test-DebugPreference {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param($count = 1e5)
    $Counter = 0

    for($i = 0; $i -lt $count; $i++) {
        if($DebugPreference -gt "SilentlyContinue") {
            $Counter += 1
            Write-Debug "The Counter is $Counter"
        }
    }
}

function Test-WriteDebug {
    [CmdletBinding()]
    param($count = 1e5)
    $Counter = 0

    for($i = 0; $i -lt $count; $i++) {
        Write-Debug "The Counter is $(($Counter += 1))"
    }
}

$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
Measure-Command { Test-DebugPreference  } # ~  441 ms on my hardware
Measure-Command { Test-WriteDebug }       # ~ 5995 ms on my hardware
$DebugPreference = "Continue"
Measure-Command { Test-DebugPreference }  # ~47906 ms on my hardware
Measure-Command { Test-WriteDebug  }      # ~46122 ms on my hardware