Supercharging a UAE sports app for the Dubai Fitness Challenge

The client is our long-term partner from UAE, for which we initially created the Your Fitness Coach (YFC) mobile application. YFC is a comprehensive sports platform that helps users find nearby gyms, track their daily physical activity, purchase sporting goods and services, engage with other sports enthusiasts, and more.

In 2023, the YFC application became an official partner of the Dubai Fitness Challenge (DFC). DFC is a month-long event designed to motivate Dubai and UAE citizens to adopt a healthier lifestyle. Participants are challenged to engage in sports or exercise for 30 minutes 30 days in a row through various digital and real-life competitions.

The goal was for the YFC application to support challenge participants in daily activity tracking and competition management. We were tasked with adding relevant functionality and preparing the system for the large influx of users and the registration of approximately 1 million new accounts.

To guide Dubai: 30×30 participants through the challenge and keep them motivated, we augmented the existing activity tracking functionality with a calendar that highlights dates with check marks once the required 30-minute activity is completed.

At the request of the DFC’s organizer, we expanded the functionality of the challenges section. It previously allowed corporate clients to create competitions for number of steps, calories burned, and overall activity over a period of time. For the event, our team added the ability to hold intercorporate contests.

To boost motivation even more, we added the YFC community feature, which allows users to connect, monitor, and “like” each other’s daily achievements. YFC community members can see the challenges their friends take part in and keep track of their performance on the leaderboards. Since the application pulls activity metrics from Google Fit and Apple Health, the development team created a mechanism to automatically identify and disqualify users who entered the data manually, ensuring fair play.

Load testing solution

To meet the demanding load requirements, we implemented backend optimization to allow the system to handle up to 6,900 requests per second. To identify and resolve any potential bottlenecks, we created and executed multiple scripts imitating the high user flow in the app.

To accurately predict the load, the team considered both the frequency of individual users’ utilization of specific functions throughout the day and the anticipated number of users during the event.

Scripts were written with the Apache JMeter application, aiming to create high and peak loads on individual endpoints.

The system was monitored under load using Datadog, which allowed us to log and analyze almost all metrics for the server portion of the system.

A script imitating the registration of 1 million accounts was written to test the system’s capability to deal with an influx of new users during the challenge month.

The stability of the system was tested under various loads, from 1,000 to 4,000 requests per second, with 6,900 requests per second taken as the peak load on the server side of the application.

To ensure the smooth operation of the application during the challenge and beyond, we implemented several crucial fixes and updates:

• Developed caches for various requests to decrease their loading time.
• Rewrote numerous queries and created many indexes of various types, such as B-tree, Hash, GiST, and GIN.
• Denormalized some databases and created new tables to store the aggregation results.
• Performed horizontal scaling.

Under a very tight schedule, we successfully prepared the YFC application for a large flow of Dubai Fitness Challenge participants. Rigorous load testing ensured the system was sufficiently robust to withstand the demand. As a result, during the challenge month, the app performed flawlessly, and the application doubled the number of regular users.