Process Auto-Restarts
Discussions center on the practice of automatically restarting crashed server processes and daemons, debating whether it masks bugs or ensures reliability, including tools like process managers and philosophies like 'let it crash'.
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Yes, you should semi-regularly restart everything (both OS and server processes), so you know you can bring them back up.
Don't you want to know if something restarts unexpectedly? It's a bug that should be understood and fixed. (If it's not a bug then it's not unexpected.)
How many reboots per second are you having to endure? Maybe you should make your server process crash less often.
"we can't figure out why this thing restarts so we seamlessly made it restart with no downtime by having a load-balancer/backup that kicks in when it kicks down"
Perhaps, but there are plenty of scenarios where restarting won't help (e.g. daemon misconfiguration).
Same as restarting a server. It is something that should be running all the time so turning it off points to something not working, and asking for a valid reason makes sense.
Your process manager can alert you when a restart happens. You can then fix the problem.
I've been using this for years on sysvinit systems for processes which are known to crash. It's great.
This. It's pretty rare cases in that I have to actually restart the system.
It's not fully general, but crashing and letting the outer system handle the restart can make sense for servers. The system needs to handle restarts anyway.It usually works okay unless there's a "query of death" causing repeated restarts.Similarly for command line apps.