[kstrauser]

I'd thought of making a progress bar library that you'd configure with information like:

- author_uuid: 0xdeadbeef

- download_size: 10GB, domain: example.com

- file_write_size: 10GB

- cpu_time_estimate: 8s

- download_size: 100MB, domain: othersite.com

- file_write_size: 200MB # after decompression

- cpu_time_estimate: 30s

and let it learn over time. My computer can figure out how fast it can download from example.com based on previous transfers. It can figure out how fast my hard drive is based on previous writes. It can figure out how fast its CPU compared to that particular vendor's test system based on previous runs. And if a company like Apple were to deploy this, they could pre-populate the database with very accurate guesses for file write speeds and CPU seconds.

If you had that information, the progress bar could have a pretty solid idea of how long the total progress would take.

[saagarjha]

That would depend on the APIs and language you use, of course; some of them might do buffering or copying differently.