Why some portions of software installs take longer than others? Today I was doing a software update for my phone. The first 32% installed really fast (matter of seconds) but then the rest seemed to crawl and move really slow. Whole install probably took 10 minutes. But based on the first 32% I was expecting it to take 3 minutes max. In my mind the percentage on the status bar would be based on the total size that needs to be installed. So if 100MBs needs installed each percent is 1MB and it should all move the same speed. Why is this not the case?
In: Technology
Same reason every step in Ikea furniture assembly doesnt take same amount of time. Different tasks take different efforts.
Downloading a file from server can vary greatly depending if user is on dialup vs cable vs fiber. Even same user on same setup will experience difference if server is handling just that user or 10000 other users at once.
The smaller files are faster and easier to process. Your update, install or whatever might be labeled as one file, but will have several parts that comprise the whole thing. There’s more too it, but essentially they generally like to push the small files first, and work their way through the larger files afterwards.
The second reason this can happen is that the percentage bar is based on “tasks” that need to be accomplished during the install. The tasks where the program lays out the program’s framework, or set the portion of memory to use take very little time, but if there are 10 tasks and the first 3 are telling it what to do and where to go, while the other 7 are copying files, then it will take way longer on the last portion. It completed 30% of the tasks, but those are a small portion of the work actually done.
That’s because not every install is as simple as just copying data from a compressed file from one location to another. Sometimes it needs to schedule updates of files that are open, sometimes it needs to decompress large files that are far larger than their compressed size, sometimes other things are going on in the background.
The issue with giving definitive answers here is that the reason why installations might slow down for different softwares will change for each software, there isn’t one overarching cause.
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