Error - Rails application failed to start properly
This article may be relevant if you see the following error message from the Talks.cam website:
Application Error Rails application failed to start properly
Please note this error is subtly different from the "Application Error (Apache)" - please refer to Error - Application Error (Apache) for advice on that error.
What were you doing when the error occurred?
- If you were trying to Edit the Venue of an existing Talk when you saw the above error message, then please see: Venue editing issue.
- If you were trying to Add a List to another List or Add a Talk to a List when you saw the above error message, then please keep reading.
- Otherwise, please contact us for further advice.
When Adding to a List you may encounter a limitation of Talks.cam
Unfortunately the problem you have encountered is most likely due to a current limitation of Talks.cam.
In summary, there is a small chance that retrying at another time when the server is less busy may succeed, but most likely there is no way to make this work with the current limitations of the server and software. (Further details about this are given below).
This is obviously not very satisfactory, and we hope to fix this along with a number of other known problems with Talks.cam some time in the medium term. We are really sorry that there is no quick or easy fix.
Further details
In order to add a list (or a talk) to another list, Talks.cam has to compute all the extra implicit links that this new explicit link entails.
For instance, say one is adding list X to list Y; not only does X become part of Y, so do all of the (potentially hundreds of) talks/lists belonging to X - they all become part of Y too. Furthermore, if list Y belongs to any other lists (either directly or indirectly), both X and its children become part of all of Y's ancestors, etc etc.
Alas, the way this has been implemented in the software is not efficient enough, and thus if there are too many implicit links to be computed and the server runs out of time before being able to finish the computations, the "adding to a list" operation will abort, and you will see the error message shown above.
