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A comment on Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitoring?. Parent comment

Re:Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitor... by derefr on Monday July 22, 2013 @09:01PM (#6087542)
Right now, I use Upstart (and thus Ubuntu) because it can--kinda-sorta--do the same "supervision-tree" thing that Erlang/OTP does; you can have a virtual "service" that runs a script on startup to get a list of tokens, then starts a set of dynamic children using those tokens ("initctl start myservice/worker FOR=bob", that kind of thing), monitors them, and restarts them when they crash; bringing down the supervisor cleanly shuts down its currently-running dynamic children, and so on.

Can systemd do that? I like everything else I've heard about it, but I haven't seen any documentation regarding this sort of usage.

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Re:Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitor... by jallmann on Monday July 22, 2013 @10:05PM (#6087750)
Funnily enough, last time I set up a supervision tree hierarchy with Upstart, I was thinking the whole time, "this would be so much nicer with Erlang." I think that was my a-ha moment for OTP.

For most standalone systems though, Upstart works nicely enough as long as services don't need too much coordination.

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Re:Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitor... by JoshTriplett on Monday July 22, 2013 @09:19PM (#6087600)
systemd can, right now, launch "template" services based on a common template with a parameter. For instance, the usual set of text login prompts are services named [email protected], [email protected], ..., [email protected], all spawned from a template [email protected].

systemd is currently adding support for dynamic service "instances", which would allow you to launch and close such services on the fly.

So, depending on how dynamic you need the list of virtual services to be, the answer is either "yes, that works right now" or "yes, that's available in the latest systemd release, but probably not in your distro yet".

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Re:Poll: What do you use for Unix process management/monitor... by fbeans on Tuesday July 23, 2013 @03:27AM (#6088663)
Probably time to use a distribution that does rolling releases!
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