Accuracy of upload time remaining

I heard this could be related to time for processing thumbnails - but I did some testing and that seems to be a very small part of the problem.

Tested uploading 83MB of files, and the upload completed successfully (great), however the estimated time results were quite off:

After 5 minutes (given time to stabilize) IU was reporting 10 minutes remaining, which was an order of magnitude incorrect. Then towards the end of the upload after a couple hours it was reporting *more* time than should have been remaining.

The reason I feel this is important is because it seems it can confuse or frustrate end users. We noticed people commenting about it during our beta testing.

Thank you for your consideration.

PG

Yes, exactly. Image Uploader 3.5 will finally fix this problem.

But anyway, in further releases we will try to make it smarter.

>Unfortunately the task of estimation time remaining is not as simple as it may seem. Image >Uploader have to take into consideration not only upload speed, but also speed of resizing ?>and compressing to JPEG.

I don't think this is the primary issue. Large inaccuracy in estimation can be seen even if no resizing or jpeg compression is taking place.

Even if resizing and compression are taking place, it should not be significant because it is such a small percentage of time.

To prove this point, in my example the upload data was 83MB and about 50 photos. The time to resize and recompress 50 photos is only <2% of the time to upload.

So given the time to compress and resize is only 2%, this should not account for wild discrepencies (if the algorithm is coded optimally).

I think most of us would gladly accept a 2% margin of error.

You missed important step of preparing thumbnails which happens before upload. It is our main pain as entire progress consists of two different steps:

1. Preparing thumbnails

2. Uploading

Upload process is regular and it is easy to calculate TR, ET, EL.

Entire process of thumbnails creating is irregular as source images can have different sizes. On other hand thumbnails creation for separate picture depends linear on pixel count. This way algorithm should consider pixel count of each picture, as well as total pixel count (sum of pixel count of all images).

For precise progress displaying we should know 2 important estimations before begining of thumbnail creation or upload:

1. Megapixels per second processing (it is based on total computer speed);

2. Upload speed.

At initial phase we can estimate this values using tests. We can have also some empiric estimations. After begining thumbnails creation and uploading we can correct them.

We have started to implement this algorithm which will be available in Image Uploader 3.5.

May be I have explained a bit complicated, but please let me know if anything is unclear :)