It is too bad that Streamyx (owned by Telecom Malaysia Berhad) seems to be the only one ISP company which can still survive in Malaysia.

The other ISP called Jaring (owned by MIMOS Berhad) has largely scaled down its business operations after about ten years’ entanglement with operating losses. Jaring was notorious among the Malaysian internet users after it had chosen to disclose its clients’ email information to the Police during 1998, and hence led to the ISA arrest being invoked by the then IGP Tan Sri Rahim Noor on several emailers due to the then IGP’s falsely accusing them for unlawfully disseminating the sensitive information in relation to riot plot. The information was said by the Police to have caused harm to the public tranquility.

Malaysia’s over-dependency on Streamyx as the only sustainable ISP indicates that the higher degree of freedom of speech which has been permitted by AAB’s administration is indeed too fragile. Many popular blogsites in Malaysia such as Malaysia Today by RPK or Lim Kit Siang Blogsite will need a proper job done on the systems administration from the part of Streamyx in order to ensure the smooth running and timely maintaining of the blogsites for access by all worldwide. After Najib’s espected taking over of the full power of the Prime Minister from AAB at early April 2009, the future prospect about the freedom of speech may not look too good to majority Malaysians who are keen to see the existence of a high degree of freedom of speech in Malaysia. If Najib has finally decided to send an undercover to Telecom Malaysia or Streamyx for purpose of planting a sabotage software into the ISP’s mainframe computer operating system, then those popular blogsites like Malaysia Today by RPK and Lim Kit Siang Blogsite will soon be turned into a highly inefficient blogsite which takes many donkey hours to transmit only a few bytes of simple information from the ISP’s mainframe computer to a remote workstation at the internet enduser’s desktop. This sabotage will be very effective in causing a ruin in a quiet and unwary manner with respect to the political cause of the Opposition Parties.

In view of the possible threat of internet sabotage, YB Kit should start thinking of an alternative solution for passing information to the public in event of happening of blogsite interference or cyberattack by the potential blogsite hackers.

“p.s. Server going down for maintenance reboot at 19:30 Feb 23 UTC. That is 3.30am 24 Feb in Malaysia” (sys admin)

I wonder when sys admin says that the Server is to be shut down for reboot, whether he means that TM’s Server is to be shut down or whether the server of another provider of the blogsite services is to be shut down.

I just hope that the problem of significant slowdown in downloading can be easily resolved after the server computer has been rebooted by 3:30 am 24 Feb 2009 Malaysia Time.

However, if the reboot attempt is to eventually show that it does not help to provide answer to the current fault complaint, then sys admin can perhaps take my hints to replace the whole hard disk of the present Server. I suspected that the lost packet problem could possibly be caused by bad sectors on the hard disk. When bad sectors exist on the hard disk, virtual memory operation (data swap to and fro Random Access Memory and the Hard Disk in order to overcome the physical memory shortage problem) could have caused some missing in the data which were supposed to be written on the bad sectors.

I look forward to seeing a significant improvement in the downloading speed of Lim Kit Siang Blogsite after 24 Feb 2009.

Good Luck, sys admin!

sys admin,
Sorry to inform you that your server computer reboot attempt (I presumed it had already been done early this morning) was still not able to resolve the slow downloading problem at the client’s computer. I wonder whether you have detected any bad sectors on the hard disk of your server computer.

Nevertheless, the reboot attempt was a good first step to do the diagnostic procedure in order to detect the source of the fault. If you are confident now that you can rule out your server computer as the source of the fault, then you shall be able to narrow down the problem areas in order for you to detect the true culprit of the fault. If I were you, my next follow up step would be to find out whether there is any other ISP operator in Malaysia which can provide the same ISP services with improved quality and then try a parallel running on this new ISP’s server along with TM ISP’s server in order to test out the reliability of the new ISP’s server.

However, if both ISP companies’ server computers are giving the same problem of slow downloading at the client’s computer, then you may further narrow down the problem areas to the cabling network of Telekom Malaysia. In most cases, if the fault is due to cabling problem, most telephone users in the problem giving location shall have detected the same fault when logging into the internet. If there are not many complaints which have been received by Telekom Malaysia from telephone users who live in the same physical location which shares the same telephone cable, then it is very likely that Lim Kit Siang Blogsite has been launched a cyberattack by an unknown computer criminal!

Sometimes it takes a long time in order to successfully detect the source of the computer fault. However, please don’t give up too soon and continue to put in the best effort in order to get the problem solved. The majority friendly readers of this blogsite will surely stand behind you in your attempt to get the problem solved!

Taiking suspects that Lim Kit Siang Blogsite has been cyberattacked by someone through data filtering on TMNet’s (or TM’s) backbone server computer. In order to find out the answer to confirm whether Taiking’s accusation is true, sys admin may test it by way of setting up an alternate blogsite with the same data as that of Lim Kit Siang Blogsite but the alternate blogsite shall be named differently, such as “fatheroflimguaneng.blog.com”

Tjwork’s suggestion for optimising Lim Kit Siang Blogsite really makes sense. I found that the past years’ data were still being kept in the same blogsite and the blogsite system had been designed in such a way that all historical data would be accumulated, with some sorting techniques being applied through a proxy server to sort the data by chronological order (basically by Month of Year). Big piles of multibillion bits of data could have been accumulated throughout many years’ operation in this blogsite. Obviously, some housekeeping work has to be performed now because it is highly inefficient to transmit too much unnecessary data (or redundant data) over the world wide web.

I guess Lim Kit Siang Blogsite may not be the only blogsite which encounters such a slow downloading problem at the client’s end. Malaysiakini blogsite sometimes also faces the bottleneck problem of traffic hog but it will change to text based display (in order to significantly reduce the number of data bits that are to transfer through the internet for purpose of overcoming the traffic congestion problem) whenever heavy traffic has been detected.

Dr. Mahathir’s chedet blogsite also faces the same traffic congestion problem sometimes. The systems administrator of chedet blogsite chose to change the name of the blogsite in order to enable the historical data remain intact with the old blogsite name but by changing the blogsite name the chedet blogsite under a new blogsite name is able to serve by significantly cutting down the redundant data. With this method, redundant data are no longer required to be transmitted along with the up-to-date data. Such technique seems to be able to effectively resolve the traffic congestion problem on the blogsite which serves the data demand heavily from the enduser clients which scatter throughout the world every minute, meanwhile the historical data are still made available for enduser’s access.

sys admin shall try to optimise Lim Kit Siang Blogsite now since not every reader of this blog is going to switch their modem to a 1-megabit high performance ones in order to overcome the traffic congestion problem.

Why is there an off-and-on data packet loss problem? I think the TM backbone server computer has to configure certain time limit that is the time frame permitted to a client in the server’s operation to deal with the service request from a remote client which engages with the mainframe server’s CPU usage. When the data transmission speed becomes exceptionally slow due to heavy load of data to be transmitted at the client’s request, the mainframe server will automatically truncate the service when the time limit has been reached. This is sometimes called “time out error” in computer terminology. The time limit is required to be set in the environmental configuration for the running of the computer operating system in order to prevent any client from overburdening the mainframe server, such as in the case of happening of an intensified cyberattack by the malicious client computer.

Graphical data take up a lot of memory spaces due to its huge size in terms of binary digit (bit). To minimize the transmit of unnecessary graphics through the internet is a useful way for improving the performance of an internet downloading operation. The webpage designer shall always bear this concept in mind. Otherwise it is quite easy for any blogsite to run into a traffic hog problem.