On 15/12/10 03:21, Richard Porter wrote:
On 14 Dec 2010 David J. Ruck wrote:
On 14/12/2010 09:52, David H Wild wrote:
The time remaining is always calculated as if the current downloading speed
would remain constant at the present value. This is unlikely to be true as
speeds tend to vary considerably and so the time remaining figure is not
really useful at all.
[snip]
Either the time should be calculated by using the
time already passed and the fraction of the file downloaded so far, or the
time should be dropped from the display with only the fraction shown.
[snip]
I agree with this. Speeds can fluctuate wildly at times, but if you
average the transfer rate over the last ten seconds you'll get a much
better estimate of the time remaining. If you just use the number of
bytes received over the last second the result is too volatile to be
useful.
Well! There could be a lot of argument about this - for example
this morning I had a file download the rates for which went from
15kb/sec to just under a megabyte/sec - over a few seconds - and then
down to 80kb or so - and so on up and down.
I strongly suggest that a moving average be adopted as the most
useful measure.
Keith
