When I hit ‘Submit’ just now, I got a prompt to download a PHP file (forgot the name – might have started with ‘w’, sorry!) which usually happens when the headers have been mangled.

I am glad to inform you that the downloading at my computer of Lim Kit Siang Blogsite is as fast as rocket. Congratulations for the tremendous improvement in the downloading speed now!

Do you like to share with us what you actually did that was able to resolve the slowdown downloading speed problem which occurred for about 6 days at my side?

I know you make feeds available, which do use ‘Last-Modified’ to save bandwidth when there are no new comments, but I wonder how many of your visitors use your feeds? It’s a web feature I’ve tried once or twice, but never used in earnest. I’ve wished you had polls on here before…

I’ll shut up now, I’m digressing again.

If there’s really no dynamic content of great interest on the blog pages, why not send ‘Last-Modified’? That way, your server won’t send the page to someone who’s frequently reloading (in the hope GodFather has made a comment), when in fact there are no new comments. When your browser sees that Last-Modified is older than the page it showed you last time, it just shows you the copy it has locally, and doesn’t download an identical copy from the server.

I imagine ‘Last-Modified’ could save a lot of bandwidth during stressful episodes in Malaysian politics!

In fact in almost in all field these corrupt fellow privatize to made their cronies rich so that they provide the poltical funding.

Btw, is CAPTCHA consuming too much of LKS’s blog server’s time.

sysadmin – The re-CAPTCHA is processed on their server side. Besides, its for a good course

Promise me that when Pakatan Rakyat takes over the government of this country, you (you, as in Pakatan Rakyat) will put a stop to these monopolies, especially TM and Astro. They are sucking us dry for years and still expecting us to be thankful for their shoddy service. I am so (SO) sick of them.

As for Tmnet, I have one outstanding report since August 2008 that has not been resolved yet. They have sent technicans, thier so-called experts, and even wrote to the MCMC numerous times. Forget the commission. In my opinion, they are simply a subsidiary of TM, judging by the way they handled my complaint.

A few minutes ago, I read that they (tmnet) are claiming some “circuit fault” as the cuplrit this time. I must admit this excuse is a new one! The “broken underwater cable” thingy was already used too many times in the recent past, I suppose. Seriously, they can tell us anything and we will be none the wiser… :)

Anyway, here are my 2 recommendations, Il explain why later.
1. http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html
2. http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/lighttpd-mod_compress-gzip-compression-tutorial.html

Just follow this 2 formulae & your readers would see a speed increase of from 400%-900%.

Ok, no matter how slow the site gets, the speed is the same, only the bandwidth differs.

Using a water supply pipe as an example, the bandwidth is the diameter of the pipe, but the force / pressure of the water is the same, which technically means 1 packet travels at the same speed all the time.

The problem we have is that Uncle Lim’s site has too many packets due to the size of the pages & images etc. As I said, some packets got lost and the sync process abandons it making it ro resent the packets again, this congestion normally causes havoc.

The best way to solve this is by making the site as compact as possible, adhering the rules mentioned above & minimizing the User request to below 5.

Either than that, the site ping is healthy for a vps hosting in slickhost. So, it should not be a problem.

Hope your administrators are not upset with my humble comments, just trying to help, If you need more info, please feel free to contact me. Needless to say, Im one of that readers that suffer from this.

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.

Hello BT – do you have an ‘extreme roaming global’ broadband package? I moved to Malaysia a few years ago, and I’m considering moving back to the UK because I miss BT Broadband so much. TM Net can’t make broadband work more than about 75% of the time, and 35% of the time it’s worse than dialup. I had only 1 hour downtime with BT in 4 years, and you sent a man in a van round the day before to tell me I would. And it was cheaper than Streamyx!
Why does it have to be so bad?
Thanks for listening.
I feel better now.
Let me know if you have a package suitable for a West coast Malaysia residential address, OK? Anything cheaper than a 3 bedroom house in the UK and shipping containers for our furniture will do.

And they sent me this reply:

If you return to the UK we would be able to set up an account to provide our broadband service. There is a service that we can provide to enable you to use our broadband service outside of the UK if you would need to do so at a later date. You do need to have BT broadband connected at an address within the UK. BT FON is an initiative between BT and FON that aims to provide access to Broadband wherever you are in the world. This is possible because all BT FON members agree to securely share their WiFi internet access, through a separate channel on your wireless routers, with other members who are in range.

You would be able to connect to broadband at any FON hotspot around the world. You are able to find Hotspots by looking on the map located at http://www.fon.com/en/. Please click on http://www.fon.com/en/ and select FON Maps, located at the top of the page in the right-hand corner. The hotspots are shown on the map as light or dark green circles.

Interesting idea – it’s a community of people sharing their personal Internet connections, providing their own WiFi ‘hotspots’. It would still be dependent on TM’s infrastructure (and against ToS), of course. There are other ‘community networks’ in the world, particularly in sparsely-populated areas where the national telecomms companies don’t want to spend money on infrastructure. The equipment is so cheap and reliable these days, it would be fairly straightforward (and comparatively cheap) to equip your own neighbourhood with a 10-1000MBit/s network, so long as you got most of your neighbours to join in. The other tricky problem, as ever, is national and international access. If your neighbourhood was large, you could always ‘pool’ private connections (similar to FON).

So what the heck is happening? TMNET is filtering LKS’s blogsite info, I suspect for purposes and reasons only they know. In our country the link to the Internet backbones is eventually through TNMET (let me know if I am wrong). And btw is that the reason why they are so resolute on not having a competitor? So that the filtering can be more effective and complete. You see data packets will run anywhere they want to get to the final destination (ie visitor’s computer). If there is another access point to the backbones then assuming equal distribution, only half the data packets would take tmnet to reach our computer’s http. In which case they can filter only half.

Sorry! I may be confusing to mention only ISP and not mention anything about ‘web hosting company’ since I do not know whether sys admin is the employee of a web hosting company or is the tenant of some harddisk space of the web hosting company. However, when sys admin said that he was going to reboot the server, I assumed that he wanted to reboot the web hosting server.

Frankly speaking, I do not know much about the computer hardware setup in a ISP like TMNet in Malaysia. I was wrongfully assuming that Telekom Malaysia should be consistent in its telecom service quality when providing such a service to all users throughout the whole Malaysia.

If the computer fault is suspected to be originated from certain segments of the Telecom Service Wide Area of Telekom Malaysia (TM), I wonder whether the Malaysians can engage the remote Telecommunication services that are provided by some international companies like AT&T in order to bypass the telecom service monopoly by TM in Malaysia.

Perhaps optimizing it would be faster to the traffic hog lately. Then it would be easy on your readers.

1. Compress all your traffic out, gzip, mod_deflate would be good for apache (in you case theres an equivalent in light httpd)

2. Have your scrips written way down below at the end of your files, the load slower & block everything.

3. Have 1 large image that shows all the images listed in this site, when displaying the image, you could specify which region of the large image to use, So users would only download it once.

4. Please make the fonts scalable, for eg, I have a 24 & 30 inch monitors, I dont need glasses to read your post.

There are more things to do, My humble suggestions will do the trick, but please consult Yahoo’s Web Optimizing techniques if you need a checklist.

Cheers

Ahhh 2007, that was a good year for broadband. 2008 was terrible. How odd is it that I should think of broadband in the same way wine buffs think of wine? As though network problems are ‘Acts of God’ – like failed harvests!

OnPol’s suggestion (I think you might be confusing ISP with ‘hosting company’) to compare two connections is exactly what I wasn’t looking forward to doing last night. I have a DiGi EDGE modem as well, so I was going to compare network traffic logs – I’m pretty sure the packets from TM (from some networks, but not all?) are either being dropped or damaged. You can use WireShark from wireshark.org (it’s free open source software) to capture the raw packet data. It’s not rocket science, but it is exceptionally tedious. I can no longer do it – I’ve got ‘lucky’ Streamyx at the moment!

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!

In Bolehland, we have a school computerisation system where computers don’t work. We have an airport with 2 runways, but they can’t be used simultaneously because someone bought the wrong radar. We have CCTVs at airports, at banks, at traffic intersections, but very few of them actually work. We have roads that crack posing dangers to users. We have “advanced” defence equipment but no available spareparts. We have blackouts when the utility claims that our reserve margin is close to 50 pct.

This “tidak apa” attitude has to stop. In the good old days when resources were plentiful, you could be forgiven for closing one eye but in today’s environment where every ringgit of expenditure counts, no wastage or inefficiency should be tolerated.