jlist9 wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My understand is that nginx doesn't launch a process, being it a CGI process
> or FastCGI back-end server. I wonder what are the reasons behind this decision.
> I used to use another web server that takes care of launching FastCGI processes.
>
> The nice thing about it is that the web server checks if a backend process is
> running. If not, it automatically starts it. This means, for whatever reason if
> the backend process crashes, it will be re-launched. Also, the web server
> gets to control how many back-end server processes to start, according
> to the conf file. With this managing the processes is really easy, because
> it's all managed by the web server.
>
> This is a very handy feature. Any chance of having this in nginx?
>
> Thanks,
> Jack
>
Thats adding a lot of extra functionality into nginx, and there are many
other daemons which specialize in this functionality. Also, if one of
the children dies badly it could take out nginx itself; not great for
graceful handling of errors since nginx can handle upstreams being down
by returning a custom 50x page.

For daemons which can manage FCGI processes check out Monit (from
tildesoft), Supervisord (python, personal fav.), and God (ruby). I
belive nagios can also do this along-side providing uptime statistics.