[ELI5]Why do loading progress bars seem to always stop at 99%
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I’ve worked at companies where I’ve made progress bars and I’ll give you the dirty little secret, most progress bars don’t measure anything. They are just there to give the user some type of indication that the application is doing something behind the scenes and not just hanging.
Honestly, it’s typically impossible to measure actual progress. With the variety of CPU speeds, memory, network speeds, etc, it’s impossible for a programmer to know which piece will take what time on different computers someone is running on. So like others have said, some are just timers and they increment after X period of time has passed. Some break it up into steps and based on how many steps are done, increment by a certain percentage. It’s all kind of a mixed bag.
To OP’s actual question, pausing at 99% just means that it is taking longer than the programmer thought it would when they made the progress bar, but it isn’t done yet, so it is letting you know it’s not done while it does everything else it needs to do.
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