8 Minutes Remaining. No, wait! Make that 52 mintutes
Posted by on Saturday, May 10, 2003 in - 9 comments
Can anyone shed any light on why the time estimates in file copying dialog boxes in Microsoft Windows are so ridiculously inaccurate? Is this a difficult problem to solve? I know BeOS handled it remarkably well. What about other operating systems? Mac OS (classic or X), the linux GUIs, etc?
Comments
Stephen DesRoches - May 10, 2003 2:36 pm
I've always thought that estimated time left was based on the current demand on system resources of your computer (same goes for downloading). It will take 8 minutes to copy but then another process starts running in the background and now it will take 52 minutes because your sharing resources.
ex: I'm downloading a file and it estimates 10 minutes. If I start browsing sites with large downloads that time could increase to 20 minutes as I'm now sharing bandwith.
nathan - May 10, 2003 2:48 pm
It's one of the mysteries of life.
It can be a difficult problem to solve well for <i>all</i> cases, however the Windows implementation seems to be poor in <i>most</i> cases.
Steven Garrity - May 10, 2003 2:52 pm
This always struck me as an issue that Bill Gates would run into someday when backing up photos of his new house, call a chief engineer, and shit all over him until it worked.
garoo - May 10, 2003 3:56 pm
But how are you so sure that Bill Gates uses a Windows computer? :)
garoo - May 10, 2003 3:58 pm
(Ok, just in case someone would want to flame me for that, I typed too fast, and didn't mean "a Windows computer" as in "a Windows computer", but rather "he uses Windows, or a computer at all" and my fingers went too fast and pardon my French.)
Levi - May 15, 2003 10:27 pm
AFIAK, Windows takes the current transfer rate for the current file, and multiplies that by the amount of files remaining. It's really quite primitive.
Levi - May 15, 2003 10:30 pm
s/afiak/afaik/
My apologies.
Steven Garrity - May 15, 2003 10:35 pm
Yeah Levi, that seams right. When you're copying a large group of files, the time will swing wildly when zipping through small files vs. working through large files.
Wesley - November 26, 2003 6:24 am
I would have thought that the better idea would be to calculate the total size of the infomation you were copying and calculate a ETA based on that. I suspect MS doesn't do this -- witness that you could ask it to copy a folder w/ 500 files from location A to location B, but 367 files into the request it tells you location B is full. In fact, I guess internally, the process is still that each file is moved as a individual unit. I guess to illustrate what I have just poorly explained, find someone who still has Windows 95 (w/out IE 4.0 installed). When you copy a bunch of files or a folder in that OS, the progress bar would show the progress of each <i>individual</i> file and reset to zero before the next file.