[426] ETA changes wildly

[TheDude]

Hi !

I find that in all versions of utorrent, the ETA changes back and forth from absurdly long values like 3 weeks to unrealitisticly short values like 1 hour.

This is basically unusable, and I don't find this in any other BT client.

If one only downloads the most popular torrents with hundreds of seeds, you don't seed this because they max out your download. However, with private tracker torrents, where there may even only be one seed, the speed can vary widely and the ETA needs to take that into account.

As mentioned in a closed thread on the same topic (which was started because the Forum Search feature doesn't work very well), the ETA used by BitTornado (and thus ABC as well) works really well, and gives one a stable ETA that is very accurate, and hardly changes at all.

Since that is open source, there is no reason that the developer of utorrent could not look at that code to see how it works.

Currently, in order to get a more accurate ETA, I have to subtract the start time from the time of day and divide by the percentage completed. If I can get a more accurate ETA in 10 seconds using a $3 calculator...

I really appreciate the great work done in making utorrent the best BT client, and so it is frustrating when these few major things are ignored in favor of things like the F7 button.

[Firon]

I believe what ludde said the last time I mentioned this was "I don't know any good algorithms for ETA"

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

Can you describe in simple terms what the current ETA algorithm is. For example, the simplest one is "Remaining / Current DL Speed" and that would bounce a lot. A more complex on might be "Remaining / Average DL for Past Hour" and that would bounce less.

To be fair though, ETA doesn't really matter. It finishes when it finishes. Or you could be DLing happily until the only seed in the torrent leaves, taking 0.1% of the file which no one else has with him and you get stuck...