Repository navigation
"Progress" ETA updates so often it's meaningless #778
Description
The "progress" ETA seems to update 2x per second.
The ETA on a HUGE scan (3 million files, 9ish drives) is jumping right now between 2 hours to 1d 3h and everywhere in-between. Most commonly in the 8-12h range.
Expected behavior: the ETA should update every 5 minutes or so, especially with how much variance there is in the estimates.
Underlying cause: probably rmlint doesn't have a good way to Estimate the Time of Arrival (completion).
Where in code:
Seems to be here:
rmlint/lib/formats/progressbar.c
Line 209 in b311f38
And a prior merged PR changed the update rate to 2x per second (1x per 500ms).
rmlint/lib/formats/progressbar.c
Line 134 in b311f38
System:
Note: I am on an old 'stable' version of rmlint from the Mint/Ubuntu repos. But I looked at the code and I think this behavior is still there.
rmlint 2.9.0 compiled 2021-Apr-15 (rev 2.3)
mounts nonstripped fiemap sha512 bigfiles intl replay xattr btrfs-support
I think I'm on Mint 22 but it looks like my system has frozen for the second time on this job 🙃.
Activity
AlexanderTheGrey commentedon Jul 20, 2026
As a workaround, you can increase the progress redraw interval:
-c progressbar:update_interval=300000That will reduce how often the ETA changes, but it also slows updates for the entire progress bar. A separate ETA refresh interval would still be the better fix.