Why do software installation or updates always go very fast up to 90% complete, then the last 5-10% takes so much longer?

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Why do software installation or updates always go very fast up to 90% complete, then the last 5-10% takes so much longer?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are multiple ways to make a progress bar, so depends on the implementation. I suspect, that when it comes to software installation, it is basically a lot of files being unpacked in the back. When it comes to lots of read and write operations, computers behave in a little funny, albiet logical way.
Imagine, you have 1 big video file of 1GB, and then 1,000,000 small files of 1KB each. Will it take the same time to copy both sets, with the same hardware? NO.

For every file, the computer has to

– Find a space on the disk

– Reserve that space

– Read Data

– Write to new space

Now, for that single 1GB file, the first two steps are done only once. While for the 1,000,000 smaller files, the first two steps are done for each file (ie 1 million times). Hence, copying 1 million small files is much slower than copying one big file, even if they are the same size.

When it comes to software installation, the installer might look at the total size of files being written, and give you a progress bar based on it, but the big files may get picked up soon, and get written, while lots of smaller files remain at the end. and hence, even after 99% of the space taken by the files may be filled, there might be thousands of smaller files in that 1%, that are taking a little extra time than one would expect.

Anonymous 0 Comments

An accurate progress bar is difficult to code and are not critical so many are done as a last minute best effort.

There are examples in the past of progress bars that were designed to go up to a set percentage over a period of time independent of the actual state of loading. Once the time was done, it would stay at that set percentage until everything was loaded. This caused a lot of frustration as computers became faster but these programs refused to start until at least 10 minutes went past.

TLF5YO:
Progress bars are hard to get right but as long as it is moving everything is going to be okay.
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