🚀 Beating ChatGPT & TikTok? How our Meditation App Broke Records Overnight, almost crashing our servers
When Sadhguru’s Miracle of Mind meditation app launched during Mahashivaratri, none of us expected to break ChatGPT’s initial download record. But that’s exactly what happened — 1 million downloads in just 15 hours! 🤯
As part of the development team, I’m still processing the wild ride we experienced. Let me take you behind the scenes of what became one of the most successful wellness app launches in recent history.
📈 A Milestone That Defies Silicon Valley Logic
Let’s be real about what just happened: While ChatGPT needed 5 full days to hit the 1M user mark and TikTok took a whopping 8 months, our meditation app crossed this threshold in just 15 hours! 🔥 We’ve claimed the #1 Free App spot in India’s App Store, reached #3 on Android, and broken into Healthcare Top 10 charts across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and numerous other countries worldwide. 🌏
The most beautiful part? This wasn’t accomplished by a tech giant with unlimited venture capital. We’re a nonprofit team based in Coimbatore, working with modest resources but extraordinary commitment. ❤️ No billion-dollar budgets or Silicon Valley headquarters — just passionate volunteers united by one powerful mission: bringing daily meditation to everyone on the planet. 🧘♀️✨
What made it resonate so powerfully? The app offers:
- A 7-minute daily meditation for stress reduction ⏱️ with streaks and rewards for consistency.
- Sadhguru’s wisdom and insights. 🧘♂️
- “Ask Sadhguru” — an AI-powered guide for life’s questions. 🤖
But the journey wasn’t without its dramatic moments, particularly from an engineering perspective. 🧑🏼💻
💣 The Midnight Time Bomb
Picture this: It’s the stroke of midnight during Mahashivaratri, and Sadhguru is initiating thousands into the mahamantra. Simultaneously, our monitoring systems light up like a Christmas tree. 🎄
Our server was suddenly hammered with 24,000 requests per second. For context, our normal load during the announcement was around 160,000 requests per minute. This midnight spike was pushing our infrastructure dangerously close to its breaking point. ⚠️
Our DevOps engineer jokingly accused me of planting a “midnight time bomb” in the app. As it turns out, he wasn’t entirely wrong. 😅
🕵️♀️ The Culprit: A Well-Intentioned Design Decision
After diving into the logs, we identified the cause: a seemingly innocent design decision in our date-handling logic.
We built the app using Riverpod for state management on the client side, with all meditation stats (streaks, minutes meditated, etc.) dependent on the current date. To ensure users would always see fresh stats without loading delays, we programmed the app to invalidate cached data and fetch new information precisely at midnight when the date changes.
The intention was good — users would have updated UI states ready the moment they opened the app the next day. But we didn’t consider the consequences of hundreds of thousands of users’ apps all making simultaneous API calls at exactly 12:00 AM. 🕛
🚑 The Emergency Fix
Response times jumped from milliseconds to 1.5 seconds during the spike. While that might not sound catastrophic, it represented a serious problem at our scale. We quickly implemented a three-part solution:
- Invalidate date based cache when the app comes from background to foreground 📱 and when the date has changed.
- Keep the midnight invalidation only when app is active in the foreground 🕒
- When app is in background, implement a randomized delay (few seconds to minutes) before fetching new data ⏰
This simple change distributed the load across a wider timeframe, dramatically reducing server pressure. 📉
💡 Lessons for Scaling Meditation (and Other Apps)
What began as a stressful engineering crisis evolved into a valuable lesson about building for scale. Even the most wellness-focused apps need to consider the technical implications of success.
Our experience highlights the importance of:
- Anticipating concurrent user actions, especially time-based triggers 📊
- Implementing staggered or randomized scheduling for background processes 🔄
- Thoroughly stress-testing time-sensitive features 🧪
- Never underestimating how a spiritual event can drive digital engagement 🙏
The irony isn’t lost — our app was designed to reduce stress, yet the servers had a massive stress spike on launch night :D
🌍 The Bigger Picture
Beyond our technical challenges, the app’s success reveals something profound about our current moment: people worldwide are hungry for tools that support mental well-being and inner growth. The fact that a meditation app outperformed entertainment and commerce platforms speaks volumes about shifting priorities.
As we continue refining the app, this launch day learning will inform how we build features going forward. Sometimes the most valuable engineering insights come when systems are pushed to their limits. 💪
For now, we’re celebrating this milestone while keeping our servers (and ourselves) in a more meditative state. 🧘♀️✨
