Sort By Popularity w/ lots of data & sorting by multiple methods

Does the “Sort By Popularity” option on the products archive ever reset (monthly, weekly, etc), or does it just keep building?

For instance, say three years from now I add a new product that sells well, will it take forever to accumulate enough sales to move to the top? Or does it update like once a month, or quarter?

Also, in addition to this, is it possible to sort the first couple products by newness, and the rest by popularity (preferably without having to run multiple queries and fish out the products that would inevitably appear in both queries)? We prefer having the newest products always appearing first, but want the rest of the products sorted by popularity so the most sold products continue to be sold and not lost/forgotten. Currently we move new products to the top of the list manually by setting the menu order. Get’s a bit tedious with the amount of products we have.

Thanks for all the help / guidance / answers.