They could say “the connection is probably lost,” but it’s more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.
But really it’s just how it will always be. How do you estimate transfer speed? Use the disk speed / bandwidth limit? Can’t do that since it’s shared with other users/processes. So at the beginning there is literally zero info to go off of. Some amount of per-file overhead also has to be accounted for since copying one 100gb file is not the same as copying millions of tiny files adding up to 100gb.
Then you start creating an average from the transfer so far, but with a weighted average algorithm, since recent speeds are much more valued, but also not too valued. Just because you are ultra slow now doesn’t mean it will always be slow. Maybe your brother is downloading porn and will hog the bandwidth all day, or he’ll be done in a few seconds.
So to put it simply, predicting transfer time is pretty much the same as predicting the future.
Transfer speed on discs was and is almost exclusively a matter of file size, so it should be easy to estimate a much better time than the dumb “total bytes / current speed” that constantly fluctuates since file sizes are not all identical.
xkcd #612
They could say “the connection is probably lost,” but it’s more fun to do naive time-averaging to give you hope that if you wait around for 1,163 hours, it will finally finish.
But really it’s just how it will always be. How do you estimate transfer speed? Use the disk speed / bandwidth limit? Can’t do that since it’s shared with other users/processes. So at the beginning there is literally zero info to go off of. Some amount of per-file overhead also has to be accounted for since copying one 100gb file is not the same as copying millions of tiny files adding up to 100gb.
Then you start creating an average from the transfer so far, but with a weighted average algorithm, since recent speeds are much more valued, but also not too valued. Just because you are ultra slow now doesn’t mean it will always be slow. Maybe your brother is downloading porn and will hog the bandwidth all day, or he’ll be done in a few seconds.
So to put it simply, predicting transfer time is pretty much the same as predicting the future.
Transfer speed on discs was and is almost exclusively a matter of file size, so it should be easy to estimate a much better time than the dumb “total bytes / current speed” that constantly fluctuates since file sizes are not all identical.
I like rsync’s progress: speed and files left
I detest the needless line chart windows 10 had