On Wed, May 04, 2016 at 09:45:24PM +0100, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
> Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty@???> writes:
> > Process supervision is something I'm very opinionated about. In a number of
> > high availability production environments, its a necessary evil.
> >
> > However, it should *never* be an out of the box default for any
> > network-exposed service, Service failures should be extraordinary events,
> > and we should strive to keep treating them as such,
>
> That's based on a particular assumption about how 'automatic restarts'
> will be used, namely, instead of fixing server errors and not as
> complement to that: I treat 'server failures' as 'extraordinary events'
> but users don't (and shouldn't): They should experience as litte down
> time as technically possible.
>
> [...]
>
> > The second reason is that it will reduce the number of high-quality bug
> > reports developers receive - if failure is part of the routine, it tends
> > not to get investigate very thoroughly, if at all.
>
> It greatly reduces the number of "low-quality" (or rather, "no quality")
> bug reports I receive as I don't (usually) get frantic phone calls at
> 3am UK time because a server in Texas terminated itself for some
> reason. Instead, I can collect the core file as soon as I get around to
> that and fix the bug.
>
> NB: I deal with appliances (as developer) and not with servers (as
> sysadmin).

An excellent example of why respawning needs to be an option, and the
OS should neither force it on or off.

-- hendrik