Process supervision

Process supervision is a form of operating system service management in which some master process remains the parent of the service processes.

Benefits

Benefits compared to traditional process launchers and system boot mechanisms, like System V init, include:

• Ability to restart services which have failed
• The fact that it does not require the use of "pidfiles"
• Clean process state
• Reliable logging, because the master process can capture the stdout/stderr of the service process and route it to a log
• Faster (concurrent) and ability to start up and stop

Implementations

• Systemd
• daemontools
• runit
• Initng
• Monit
• Finit
• Supervisor: implementation in Python
• God: implementation in Ruby
• Eye: implementation in Ruby