Feature Request - Pause at Target Completion %

[BattouSaeen]

Hello, there is a topic already on this but closed (#11812)

I would like to revisit this idea. The original suggestion involves one use case, but Francisco's suggestion at the end to set different priorities doesn't really address a wider use case, and it still involves a user to monitor things manually. His suggestion makes sense only in that particular user's particular case.

But now imagine a case as follows:

You add 5 torrents in the queue and you have ordered them correctly, i.e. file 1 should download before file 2, and so file 1 is #1 in the queue, etc.

There are two ways to make sure that file 1 downloads before file 2.

1. set maximum allowed running downloads to 1, so that #1 (ugh, how do I use # and number together without triggering random issue tagging???) in the queue is the only one allowed to download.
2. don't change the max downloads, but instead move the entire batch of 5 torrents down the queue, until 1 is in the allowed section, and 4 are in the queued section. E.g. if max allowed is 10, the batch of 5 are moved up until file 1 is #10 in the queue, and the remaining 4 become #11, 12, 13, 14, 15. Since only 10 are allowed to download, and file 1 is #10, file 1 is downloading and the rest are queued. This is a roundabout way of doing the first option above, but this is in case you want other downloads to still go on but keep these 5 files in order.

Normally, this would be fine, except there are often situations where file 1 has very low activity, so maybe it's running at 5 kb/s, while file 2 and file 4 are more active and running at 5 MiB/s. In this case, if all files are allowed to run, then files will complete out of order, and most likely file 1 will end the last.

One can use one of the two methods aforementioned to wait until file 1 finishes before starting the rest, but this means you are wasting time.

For example, f there is an option like right click -> "set target download %", where a target can be given like 90% at which point they'll stop, then you can run all of these downloads at the same time without worrying that they'll complete out of order. Because let's say file 1 is most likely going to finish last due to slower speeds, what'll happen is that WHILE file 1 is downloading, at the same time, you are allowing the more active files to also download and they will automatically stop when they reach a target. Since they won't complete, the order is still there, and the best part is that you are not wasting time waiting for file 1 to finish.

i.e. in the time you wait for file 1, you are using that time to download the bulk of the other files. Then, when file 1 finally finishes, it's a MUCH shorter time before the other files can complete because you've already downloaded most of them. The same way we have parallelisation on a CPU for instructions or any other optimised task.

With this target option, we can let other downloads continue since there are no 1-item-queues and other unrelated downloads can continue downloading, and the 5 file batch can complete in order. The only manual intervention will be to disable the target of the next file. I hope it makes sense - we are trying to download everything we can and stopping just short of completion, so that we can wait for the slow download to catch up and complete. After which, we can resume the other files, but we now don't have to wait long because 99% is downloaded already and in a few seconds they'll be complete, thereby slotting nicely in the completed queue right after the previous. As I mentioned before, other unrelated downloads might be running and completing, so this has the opportunity to stop something else from placing itself in the completed queue before the one we want. I hope that made sense!

Now of course, one of the 'ultimate' solutions would be to simply be able to rearrange/reorder files in the completed queue. I don't mean by sorting columns, I mean actual shifting up or down, the same way we can do it in the downloads queue. I recall I may have requested this a few times before but don't think anything happened regarding it. But this would definitely no longer need this target % option because then I can just set the completed downloads I want in a particular order. Having said that, this feature on its own may have some other usefulness I don't fully know at the moment - I feel like it may be useful still. Like in the linked issue from before, the person will no longer have to manually change priorities of files, which doesn't work in the case of a single file anyway.

Let me know if anyone needs a further explanation as it can get a bit convoluted. I can then maybe make a visual example.