Apple: Repair "Repair Disk Permissions"

Question

The Leopard version of Repair Disk Permissions is broke. No matter what it is doing behind the screen, it comes up with the chirpy "Repairing Disk Permissions. Estimated time: Less than 1 minute" then proceeds to wait five minutes (on a 160 GB MacBook Pro of recent vintage) before starting to move the bar from its initial, deceptive, 20% fulfilled position.
This performance and feedback flies in the face of Apple's own software behavioral edicts.
After the five-minute wait, it takes an additional 4:30 to move the bar to the end, even when it's the second run on the same drive. The reported times are NEVER accurate, never even approximate until the last 50 seconds.
And don't even get me started with all the reported failures to fix anything that consistently show up every single time.
In five minutes (300 seconds) my computer has the ability to impose 4.4 Billion computational cycles on the task of sorting out whatever ails my hard disk--per second. That's just a TRILLION point three total mathematical operations that might be brought to bear on thinking about what to do before starting to access the disk and fix its errant map of data.
To give that some scale, at one second per math problem, that equals around 42 thousand years. Which ought to be time enough to evolve the program into a more advanced version...
Message was edited by: Peter Inova1
Message was edited by: Peter Inova1
Message was edited by: Peter Inova1
Message was edited by: Peter Inova1

Answer 1

It's an interesting but irrelevant observation.
Disk Repair is not a mathematical operation - it obviously involves many disk reads - often the slowest component on a computer in terms of access times. Should any repairs be required - the system will then write and likely re-read to ensure the write was successful.
You are trying to figure out future events - how long the next action will take based on prior events - sometimes things change that make past performance a poor estimate of future performance.
As for estimating times - I've programmed this - and observed many attempts to do so - few work well or offer estimates anywhere near accurate. Observe the estimated times to complete a download in iTunes or the time to copy a file. I have seen many cases where the estimates said "10 seconds" and I waited minutes for them to complete.