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by magicalhippo 2036 days ago
Back in Windows 3.11 days, I noticed a patter with installers. Their progress bar would go steadily up for quite a while, and then suddenly spend 3x as long on just one or two percentage points.

It didn't take me long to realize that the progress bar measured bytes written to disk, but when it was seemingly "stuck", it was creating a lot of small files.

Instead of bytes written, what I really cared about is "how done are you?" and that would have been better represented by a function of both number of files created _and_ bytes written. I don't think the weighting of those two had to be very accurate to be a big improvement.