How long will that download take?

Posted on March 1st, 2007 by Mark Sheppard

I’m currently downloading the March CTP of Visual Studio Orcas. There’s two versions this month, a Virtual PC image and for the first time a full install. Combined this all totals 11.9GB and 20 files to download!

So how long will it take to download on my 4Mbs Internet Connection?

1> New-TimeSpan -seconds $(11.9gb / (4mb / 8))

Days : 0
Hours : 6
Minutes : 46
Seconds : 11
Milliseconds : 0
Ticks : 243710000000
TotalDays : 0.282071759259259
TotalHours : 6.76972222222222
TotalMinutes : 406.183333333333
TotalSeconds : 24371
TotalMilliseconds : 24371000

Of cause, that’s the theoretical maximum of my line, in reality I tend to get about 480KBs:

2> New-TimeSpan -seconds $(11.9gb / (480kb))

Days : 0
Hours : 7
Minutes : 13
Seconds : 16
Milliseconds : 0
Ticks : 259960000000
TotalDays : 0.30087962962963
TotalHours : 7.22111111111111
TotalMinutes : 433.266666666667
TotalSeconds : 25996
TotalMilliseconds : 25996000

Not bad, it’ll e done by breakfast J

I often compute this on a calculator, but PowerShell offers us a better alternative, but typing it into the command line every time will get old very fast. So I’ve just knocked together a little script to do this for me.

Usage: Calc-DownloadTime.ps1 <downloadSize> [connectionSpeed]

Both parameters are int64’s and if connectionSpeed is not supplied, it will try to use a global variable named $networkSpeed. Should the $networkSpeed global variable not exist, the script will throw an exception.


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