Confusion due to changing speed unit

[humdinger]

This is hrev48742.

With hrev48660 ActivityMonitor was altered to dynamically change network speed units. As it is now, I find that confusing, largely because the huge rounding errors when you get to 1 Mbps. You get Kbps until 999 Kbps, and then it just displays a rounded 1 Mbps and you don't know if your actual speed is 1.1 or 1.9 Mbps.

As my actual downlink speed often oscilates between a max of 1.6 Mbps and below 1 Mbps, the display changes between informative e.g. 637 Kbps and 1 Mbps.

Maybe the Mbps and upwards (do people already get Gbps?) could show a 1/1000 precision, so there's a smooth transition between e.g. 965 Kbps to 1.287 Mbps.

Or maybe there's a better solution...

[jscipione]

It sounds like you want a better string_for_rate() function.

Currently the string_for_rate() function always gives you 1 decimal digit of accuracy and switches units when it reaches 1,000 of whatever unit it is in, so if it reaches 1000 bytes per second it switches to kilobytes per second, if it reaches 1,000 kilobytes per second it switches to megabytes per second, etc.

It seems like the always giving you 1 decimal digit of accuracy is the problem, you would rather it gave you up to 3 digits of accuracy.

[pulkomandy]

In hrev48768 I changed the code to switch to Mbps only when it reaches 10000 Kbps. It will still not show any decimals, but this leads to a maximal error of 10%, rather than 50% as it was before. the downside is there can be up to 4 digits used to show the speed.