Relaxed shopping experience ~ economic slowdown?
Two weeks after Hari Raya holidays a friend coming back from Brunei to visit us. We met in 1Utama shopping center. She noticed that the crowd has reduced. She was wondering whether this is the sign of economic slowdown in Malaysia.
It could be Hari Raya holidays, I said. Many Muslim friends are celebrating their holidays for up to 30 days, such as open house, to invite friends and relatives. So they might still not come back to town yet.
Unsure by the real situation, we observe the trend for a few more weeks.
Third week on Sunday 12PM I went to IKEA for lunch. That's the usual crowd and trust me you will not want to go at 12PM as the traffic would be very jam. To my surprise, there was no jam and I could easily went in and find a parking spot. In the restaurant, the queue was long but it wasn't difficult to find a place to sit down. If you were one of IKEA frequent visitors, you would notice that finding a place to sit down was a nightmare. Not anymore.
I still didn't want to believe it. May be our government has improved traffic system. Or may be shopping center has finally improved something so that we can have more relaxed shopping experience!
Heck no.
I talked to more people. An experienced business man told me the economic has hit the retails business. It was hitting the exports business. This is a chain effect.
I waited another one week, I went to Megamall shopping center. As expected, the traffic is smoother, crowd reduced. I was talking to a retailer and he asked whether I noticed anything different to the patronage nowadays. I told him what I noticed. He said his business is dropping. It started about 2 months back. That was one month before Hari Raya.
So... this is really the slowdown of the market! It is showing sign at retails business.
Finally I talked to a Malay friend who is quite familiar with the government servants. He said few days before Hari Raya government has paid advanced salary for celebrating Hari Raya. Now everyone is waiting for the next salary month which may take longer than 30 days. So he suggested to observe again until December. He agreed that retails business seemed slowdown.
What is your observation?
Slow access to Gmail
UPDATE (9:36pm): Suddenly all working well now! Did someone fix something? I can "feel" it! Hope this stay.
Recently our Internet access to Gmail suddenly slowed down starting around evening of Tuesday, 29 Aug 2009. The errors are lost connection while login in, loading and still-loading, and almost impossible to access the mail at all. The problem is narrowed down to only affect TMnet Streamyx users using ADSL and SDSL.
The slow down also affect connection to Amazon web services, but it is still isolated because it appeared to work fine at slow speed link like ADSL at home, but not in higher speed SDSL. This is quite strange. More tests and observations needed.
All affected are international or oversea sites. Local sites within Malaysia are fine. However, not every places. Access via web browser are okay within Malaysia but access via remote login like SSH failed in certain cases.
We have observed this from Tue until Thu (today) and situation not yet improved.
Any users who use Gmail and Google Apps will be affected. If you are having this issues, please try a few options suggested below.
- Try different ISP services if you have the option.
- Try Maxis or Celcom 3G data connection (fixed data rate plan recommended).
- Use "basic HTML" interface of Gmail. Gmail probably already recommend you if you have difficulties.
- Disable use of SSL to see any improvement. This is for testing if it is bandwidth limitation. Use of SSL is recommended unless your email is not important. Re-enable back SSL for production use.
- Use POP3 or IMAP to access email. You will need email client such as Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Mail, to do this.
We suspect TMnet Streamyx is "shrinking" bandwidth speed to Gmail servers or Gmail usage has increased tremendously. Normally the use of web application is mainly HTTP, meaning, unencrypted. But Gmail default to SSL, which is HTTPS. So if the demand increased, ISP may see more SSL traffics, which might cause them to panic. Plus, SSL traffic is larger than normal web (http) traffic by at least 50% more; if not, 2 to 3 times more.
SSL traffic also cannot be cached. This mean no bandwidth optimization can be done to improve the situation.
The problem may last for more days or probably one month. Meanwhile, be patient or call 123 to complain.