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Process supervision

Type of operating system service management

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

01Benefits

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

02Implementations

  • daemontools
  • daemontools-encore: Derived from the public-domain release of daemontools
  • Eye: A Ruby implementation
  • Finit: Fast, Extensible Init for Linux Systems
  • God: A Ruby implementation
  • immortal: A Go implementation
  • PM2: A Process Manager for Node.js
  • Initng
  • launchd
  • minit: A small, yet feature-complete Linux init
  • Monit
  • runit
  • Supervisor: A Python implementation
  • s6: Low-level process and service supervision
  • Systemd
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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Process supervision, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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