rc and smf

Bill Hacker wbh at conducive.org
Thu Feb 24 10:43:42 PST 2005


Devon H. O'Dell wrote:

On Thu, 2005-02-24 at 18:22 +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:

On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 10:50:35AM -0500, Dan Melomedman wrote:

It's built on the correct assumptions. You just don't understand all
possibilities why a service process can crash/exist, even if it's a
most perfect software ever written. Shit happens, and supervision will
attempt to restart the service for any reason it exits/killed. Including
human error, of course. What you've never killed the wrong process by
mistake? What if you set an rlimit, and the service reaches it, the
kernel will then kill the service. With supervision it will be
restarted, without it, the service will be down. Simple as that.
Programs have bugs, including memory leaks.
Actually, this is exactly one of the situations where I don't want
automatic, silent restarts. It hides problems, which is in my position
even more problematic. "Magic restart" doesn't solve every problem.
Joerg


In fact, this can be quite an issue when (re)starting ``heavy''
applications every time the daemontools monitor loops when these are
e.g. misconfigured or broken.
--Devon

ACK - and a *Royal* PITA when trying to manually start-stop test and 
troubleshoot config changes - especially during an upgrade that hasn't 
been DJB-ized yet while the old one was..

'Never again'.

Bill






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