Why do loading screens always stop at 99%
In: Technology
If I told you to eat a bowl of fruit as fast as you can, while giving me updates on how close you are to finishing it – you wouldn’t be able to do it very well.
If there are 4 pieces of fruit in the bowl, you might tell me that you have completed 50% of the work after eating 2 of the 4 fruit.
But, some fruit might take you longer to eat than other fruit. If that’s true, then eating half the fruit can’t mean you’ve completed half your task.
Maybe you have a good idea of how long it takes to eat an apple; but not all apples are the same, so your estimate is going to be a little off every time.
Maybe the banana isn’t ripe. Maybe the orange was a bit harder to peel today. Maybe you weren’t expecting seeds in your grapes.
Also, you’re just trying to concentrate on eating! It’s a bit rude of me to expect you to eat this fruit as quickly as possible, while also wasting your energy working out how fast you’re doing it at the same time.
You’ve decided you’re not an expert at calculating the time to eat fruit, and you never wanted to be. Instead, you’re just going to say: “I’m 99% done, I just have to finish eating this last apple”.
It’s sometimes a trick that developers does to allow the machine to process something.
The loading progress is calculated from the amount of data copied over the total data to copy (from hard drive to ram for exemple).
But once all the data are copied, the machine must process all that, which takes time but we can’t know how long it’ll take. So developers cap the loading at 99% so that easier for users to understand that “it’s not ready yet”
Reviewing what has been downloaded and checking that it is all there and in the right place takes extra time.
Sometimes to give the appearance of steady progress the bar is set to increase at regular intervals. Leading the bar to be done before the program. However it’s possible the final task, which is usually some sort of compiling task for all the data it processed, it takes a lot more time so 99% of the tasks are done but the last one takes a bit.
To simply the complexities involved behind the scenes. Imagine a roadtrip between point A and B in a car where the kid in the back keeps asking “Are we there yet?”. The best answer any driver could possibly do is base their answer of an estimation such as “We have traveled 40km out of 200km” or phrase it as going 20% of the distance. Now I choose this metaphor since there can occur just as many interruptions when travelling in traffic, such as accidents or unexpected traffic jams. Or that the distance itself might not be the thing that can take the most time. If 90% of your distance is done on the German Autobahn at 200+ km/h speeds, but the last 10% is done on tiny off-road animal trails in the mountains, then the kid in the back wondering why “we aren’t there yet” won’t really understand since they had travelled 90% of the way two hours ago.
Never seen this sub before. Some elaborate answers that kind of confuse things.
It’s an amount of tasks, not a measure of time. Tasks are run in order and some take longer, which is why you often see a program stopping at the same percentages each time.
pc organize downloaded stuff before finish
don’t worry about my typography, i just came from the skamtebord subreddit
If you have a loading bar that does this, it can often mean that the majority of the loading bar involves some sort of task that can be done continuously (and thus, its level of completion can be tracked reasonably well) but it has some extra tasks at the very end that can’t be estimated very well.
I would liken this to doing dishes in a dishwasher, or laundry. You throw the things in the machine, set the timer, and let it go. You can tell how close they are to completion just by looking at the time left on the wash or dry cycle. That’s where most of your progress bar comes from. But once the actual cleaning cycle is complete, there’s still work left to do. *Most* of the task is done, since everything is clean, but the task isn’t “done” until all that clean stuff has been put away! How long does it take to put that stuff away? Who knows! Depends what you loaded in. Did you fill that dishwasher with three big pans that you can just shove in a drawer, or did you load it with dozens of miscellaneous glasses, bowls, and pieces of silverware that all need to go in different places, along with small washable parts for machines that need to be reassembled? Did you wash one big bed blanket that you now have to assemble on a bed, or did you wash a dozen shirts that need to be folded?
Many progress bars that have last-minute actions like these choose to display “99%” completion at the very end, to signify the bulk of the task is done, but the entire task still isn’t complete yet. This may or may not be less infuriating than sitting at a progress bar that sits at 100%, implying the task is complete when it actually isn’t yet. As some have stated, this could be mitigated by using multiple progress bars that each track different stages of the overall task.
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