Difficulties loading blog?

Note from sys admin :

Most of streamyx users will be facing difficulties loading this blog.

This is because TMNet is having problem with their network. We do not know what is the problem they are facing, but the symptom is that data packets gets corrupted or lost along the way. This has been happening for sometime, but it got worse recently.

We thank many who have highlighted problems accessing this blog. We are constantly monitoring the situation and are trying to get TMNet to resolve the issue as soon as possible.

p.s. Server going down for maintenance reboot at 19:30 Feb 23 UTC. That is 3.30am 24 Feb in Malaysia

37 Replies to “Difficulties loading blog?”

  1. Talking about TMNet, I went to their shop to make an application for Streamyx and they took down all my particulars and said a customer service agent will call me to get all details like username, etc. A few days later, when I was overseas, the phone rang, and a lady said she was from TMNet and was calling regarding my application. Being overseas, I said that she should call me back the following week. Several weeks went by, and no call came. So I asked my secretary to call up TMNet and ask what had happened. Their reply ? “There was no record of any application.”

    So I told my secretary to make another application. This time, another customer service lady called both me and my secretary, and we confirmed username and other corporate details. A few more weeks went by, and nothing happened. The customer service lady didn’t answer her phone. So we complained to TMNet. They said OK, please make another application. So we made the third application. This time there was a definitive answer – “Sorry we can’t entertain your application”. They won’t tell why except to say that they could not input the name of my company.

    This is Bolehland where things are cheap, but the service is so bad it makes us wanna puke.

  2. Wah, sorry for all the ‘refreshing’. If it helps, the first few KB of the LKS blog pages seem to load okay, it’s the rest that either takes minutes or never comes. So just write haiku articles, and we’ll say “like” or “don’t like”.

    I cancelled my Streamyx last year because it was like this on good days. On bad days last year, even the phone was dead. I wrote to TM and MCMC, but they said they wouldn’t help me if I didn’t have a contract. I tried to tell them that they didn’t help me when I had a contract, but it didn’t appear to help. I reported faults every month last year. Last week, when the new contract was activated, I had 3 teams visit the house. They told me everything was perfect and that nobody ever complained. On several occasions when the phones were completely dead last year, I walked around the neighbouring houses and businesses and they confirmed it was the same for them, but they didn’t complain “because nothing will be done, it only wastes more time”.

    In some ways, it would be easier if they weren’t so nice about it. Say what you like about TM, I’ve always found their staff unerringly polite. I find it very strange that I should be treated this way, when they’re neither slapping me nor calling me ‘b!tch’.

  3. This is what we refer a bumiputra company.

    Too protected, they do not care it profit or no profit caused they are protected.

    If business loss in profit government will give money to cover the loss caused it is bumiputra company.

  4. All huge monopolizing business giants know how to make money..no service…no follow up…spent all profits…no upgrading plans….no quality control…research and upgrade dept…and know next to nothing about obligations to customers.
    Just look at Astro today…repeating and repeating…same old stuffs…and the so call “live” Acadamy Awards…..from 4am Monday …up to now..almost Tuesday morning…..repeating and repeating………no live show on the said award show… at all!!
    Then electricity simply cut off…water cut off…..for hours…even days…no advance notice.
    Lets say something was wrong. At least put out a flash news in TV and radio….no way….hide hide their faults…so common.
    Everyone is hiding their faults…behaving so irresponsible..unprofessional and down right rude too.
    That’s UMNO government for Malaysians.

  5. All my working life…I pay punctually my electricity and water bills..40 years and on going.
    For the past 2 years…I get numerous warning letters..to cut off my electricity bill..not paid for 2 months!!
    I received no bills to pay at all!!
    Occasionally…it was water bill too……..now OK and much cheaper…since Khalid too over S’gore.
    I suspect Tenaga National have no meter readers…and start applying smart idea..to fool Malaysians..and cover up their faults.
    Like I sad….staffs under UMNO……they never admit their short comings or mistakes.
    God help Malaysians that need hospital and police assistants.

  6. 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.

  7. On streamyx..I have noted the lousy system for moths…but what to do..signed and paid up for the system installed.
    Yes….it is sickening to wait and wait…to get in a blog….thinking something wrong wit your computer.
    Expect TMnet to put out a notice..to explain things…like professionals should do?…..dream on.
    To them…sweep under the carpet..hide everything….best management.

  8. Aiyaa this streamyx works by complaint one. You guys must know how to give them properly. Here is the art of complaint: First call 100 and go thro all the B.S. stuff, it will take a long time.Then get the operator’s name! They must comply as it’s all recorded!The operators are highly trained to get most complainers off with silly dumb stuff by telling you grandma stories ect even asking you to do this and that and call back.Tell them you have done all. Just be patient, but be very very persistent in lodging your complaints. Finally when they say they have lodge in their report, ask the for the complaint NUMBER !! This is the most important thing to note down. It seems from my experience that once a number is given TM peeps have to get it solve in 2working days!But like I say they are highly trained NOT to give you one and they will go all lenghts to tire you guys out.If your problem not solved keep badgering them with the rpt no. Wow just imagine all you streamyx ppl with complaint numbers! Say it’s also the same with the PDRM. No official complaints= no crime what!!

  9. I have difficulties in accessing Malaysia Today, tried many times before I get it. However, I am not using Streamyx, I am happy with Jaring wireless broadband. But sometimes some of Jaring’s call centre staffs can be quite ignorant of their own products.

  10. Dear Uncle Kit

    Usually I will try using proxy server to access those site that have difficulty in loading or too slow. I believe the authority might be doing something to block or delay those information..

    I have my own setup here, if you want to access some popular blog when it is NOT ACCESSIBLE…

    http://shiokguy.blogspot.com/2009/02/censorship-on-website-access-them-here.html

    Good Luck. Do let me know what website I should include in the list

    Shiok Guy

  11. The best solutions for all problems is to have an ant-corruption government admin.

    Do not let corrupted government admin Malaysia.

    Yes, no more. Else all Malaysian be treated like a fool easily be fooled with no need any report of money being stolen and abuse.

  12. Since I posted the comment above, my access has improved enormously. Maybe something that hadn’t been working properly for months finally failed and was replaced? Bizarre – it would be interesting to know what has changed. That’s one of the huge problems as a Dribblyx customer – never knowing why you have to sit there waiting for pages that never load or ssh sessions that won’t stay connected, or why the phone has to go dead for 4 days around a deadline.

    I can currently load pages from BBC News in a few seconds, instead of minutes / timeouts like it was for the rest of the last week. Wow!

    I’m sad to hear about the JARING history – their website looks more like a responsible ISP’s website to me: it has announcements that are hours old instead of years old (like streamyx.com), and Awang Lah makes a lot of sense on his letters page. I was using DiGi EDGE while I was sulking and trying to find alternative wired access (there isn’t any where I am). I thought it was very good, but slower, of course.

    In response to OnPol’s suggestion of ‘finding alternatives for passing information’ – there aren’t any good ones. The Internet is a licensed medium in Malaysia (I don’t know of a place where it isn’t – maybe community mesh networks?) so if the government wants you to use it the way they want it used, that’s what will happen. If anybody decides to tighten the screws on the Malaysian Internet, LKS will have to apply for a slot on Voice Of America or the BBC World Service.

    Proxy servers are ok for the 5 people who know how they work – same as in China behind The Great Firewall. A dedicated attempt to shutdown contrary opinion online would be neither technically challenging nor expensive, and there’s no really reliable means of getting around it, except for buying plane tickets. It would only be a year or so, and we’d all be ‘harmonised’.

  13. “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!

  14. Someone conservatively estimated that projects in Bolehland are overpriced by at least 30 pct. Now I don’t mind this sort of overpricing if the projects work properly. After all, the crony systems in Japan and Korea also cause projects there to be generally overpriced – but at least over there, whatever they construct work.

    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.

  15. 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!

  16. I doubt the server reboot was linked to the network problem. Whatever it was, it was the same problem that was affecting my Streamyx connection for last year from about March until I cancelled it in October, and again this year when I started a new contract a couple of weeks ago. But then last night, after having terrible problems loading sites all day (not just LKS blog), it was suddenly much better! I have the 512kbit/s unlimited package, and it is as good (since yesterday evening!) right now as it was in December 2007 when we upgraded to 1Mbit/s.

    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!

  17. Dear Uncle Lim,

    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

  18. “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.” (OrangRojak)

    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.

  19. I did a quick test on some other sites both local and foreign. Download speed ok. You guys can try too. Check out BBC International and CNN for foreign sites. And try some local sites like ipsofactoj.com and cljlaw.com. Google test some keywords and see what happens. They operate normally I am sure.

    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.

  20. …bypass… Good question OnPol. Last year when Streamyx was really, really bad, and I’d spent 6 months of working nights on a couple of projects that depended on wired Internet to my home, I sent this message to BT (What was British Telecom):

    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).

  21. 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.

  22. Well, what we have here is a classic case of bandwidth bottle neck coupled with some faulty access points, where packets are lost in cyberspace. I have to apologize as I was timed out several times before posting that my fingers memorized the previous post.

    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.

  23. Dear Sdr. Lim Kit Siang,

    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… :)

  24. I did consider the possibility of site overloading. But LKS’s site has between 100-300 visitors logged in at any one time (based on my own observation). That does not appear to be a large number to me. In any event, most of their logged in time will be spent on reading blog entries and scrolling the screen. Such activities do not involve any active communication with the blog server and if they do it is unlikely (given that 300 is not a large number) that they would coincide. Besides, the site has very little pics.

    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

  25. The other day, I received a mail showing a letter written by a loyal Aussie citizen literally F…..G his Gomen services for asking him to fill repeat standard information which should have been captured once for all. Obviously such sickness is not confined to any nation. All those in the civil services around the world are doing the same dumb thing over and over again. Is it an issue of they not having some work to do? Or they want to appear doing something but not that which requires some thinking!!
    Down South, I was told you need only your name and IC number and HO! you have it. With MSC all over the country and billions spent, why are we still not being able to compete???
    Ask TDM or AAB, or even DNR ?? Maybe we are just wasting our time! they would n’t know fopr sure!!

  26. All the power crazy go all out to control even the communication also monopoly.
    Read about the ERL made you sicker. In the name of privatization the poor consumer made to subsidy all those cronies.

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

  27. Something the admin might want to try is setting the blog to use ‘Last-Modified’ in the server response. This is a WordPress blog, so (according to codex.wordpress) they don’t send Last-Modified with article pages because there might be non-WordPress dynamic content included on the page. LKS has a ‘users online’ widget from somewhere, I think (don’t know – that sort of thing is blocked in my browser). I think most of your visitors could live without seeing the numbers of users updated when there are no new comments! An example of the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to block is Google AdSense advertising – you’d want your visitors to see new ads, even if nobody had left a new comment.

    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!

  28. Oops, might have used a bad example. Maybe dynamic included content from other sites (like Google ads) will update in a cached page, even with ‘Last-Modified’? Maybe it depends on whether it employs client- or server- side scripting?

    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.

  29. sys admin,

    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?

  30. My blog.lks speed is currently good too, but for the last few hours, I’ve been getting error pages while loading this site saying “The [connection/transfer?] was interrupted” (that’s a page Firefox shows), and occasionally pages with the top missing, so I get a browser window full of HTML source. I’ve never seen either of those two problems before today on this site. The first problem I sometimes see on other sites when Streamyx is bad, the second problem I have never seen before!

    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.

Leave a Reply