Question

Are there any widgets for predicting when a download (or any other process) will finish based on percent done history?

The trivial version would just do a 2 point fit based on the start time, current time and percent done but better option are possible.

A GUI widgest would be nice but a class that just returns the value would be just fine.

Answer 1

For the theoretical algorithm that I would attempt, if I would write such a widget, would be something like:

1. Record the amount of data transferred within a one second period (a literal KiB/s)
2. Remember the last 5 or 10 such periods (to get an an recent average KiB/s)
3. Subtract the total size from the transferred size (to get a ‘bytes remaining’)
4. ???
5. Widget!

That oughta do it…

(the missing step being: kibibytes remaining divided by average KiB/s)