I have a feeling that there is a bit of subtle manipulation by the framing going on here. The current Reuters article title that I get is "Three hours a week: Play time's over for China's young video gamers", but the submission's title is "China has forbidden under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week". This conjures images of Chinese police raiding homes and punishing children or parents who are caught gaming too long.
But getting closer to the source (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm), the regulation appears to be exclusively targetting the amount of on-line gaming services that companies are allowed to offer to minors. This doesn't any seem different in principle to various Western regulations attempting limit ads[1] or pornography[2] to children. Granted, some people in the West also consider these as examples authoritarian government overreach. But my guess is that a some people's reactions are driven substantially by the specific story framing (and of course, China), more than by principled reasoning.
I worked at an ed-tech company for a few years. 80%+ of our traffic came on line in a 2-ish hour every morning. Additionally, because most schools have similar summer break schedules, we'd have this crazy ramp up in August and September where out daily active users would 10x in a little over two weeks.
It was actually a pretty unique challenge that had some weird trade-offs.
For example, when do you release new code? You've got this nice window at the end of each day when traffic is super low, so any issues with the release will affect a minimal amount of users, but on the other hand, if you release at the end of the day, you don't really know if your code works at scale until the next morning.
Similarly, what do you do during the summer period? You've got a couple quiet months in where almost no one is online where you can kind of swing for the fences in terms of changes, but at the same time, you won't really know whether it handle the full load of the customer base until September.
Sure there's things like load testing (which we did), but theres no way to truly predict how your customers will use your product. We had a really solid engineering team and ended up coming up with processes to handle a lot of these problems, but still, it was something that I hadn't dealt with before and I found pretty interesting.
The thundering herd problem in distributed systems is an often unexpected failure mode. This is great, and easy to plan for. You'd save buckets of money because most capacity is used for spikes, and you now have a good idea of when spikes occur.
Every Monday, an hour after school, scale up 5x, because the timer has reset for students. Scale down from Wednesday to Friday. Scale up 2x over the weekends.
I'd like this to be honest (from an infrastructure point of view). If the time is known for an influx of traffic I can prepare for that.
I currently look after a system which gets random spikes of traffic thats critical to serve. Which means I more or less need to run a huge amount of redundant servers 24 hours a day incase there is a spike at 2am.
We have horizontal scaling but our traffic has little lead time.
But getting closer to the source (http://www.news.cn/english/2021-08/30/c_1310157673.htm), the regulation appears to be exclusively targetting the amount of on-line gaming services that companies are allowed to offer to minors. This doesn't any seem different in principle to various Western regulations attempting limit ads[1] or pornography[2] to children. Granted, some people in the West also consider these as examples authoritarian government overreach. But my guess is that a some people's reactions are driven substantially by the specific story framing (and of course, China), more than by principled reasoning.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulations_on_children%27s_te...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Uni...