If you're talking about Apache mod_fastcgi, I agree that its built-in
process management is convenient but if you give up a little convenience,
you get some rewards in return.
1) Separation of concerns - let web servers manage requests and connections
and let process managers do process management. It keeps both simpler.
2) If you use a process manager like supervisord, you can use it to manage
any kind of daemon you may want to run, not just FastCGI daemons.

You could consider using a process manager to spawn both nginx and your
FastCGI daemons. Then you have one place to start and stop everything.

On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:27 PM, jlist9 <jlist9@gmail.com> wrote:

> The web server I used before actually has options for both remote and local
> scenarios. For back-end process running locally, the web server can start
> the processes.
>
> On Unix servers, it will also use a Unix domain socket to communicate
> with the back-end process, which is faster than a network socket.
>
> I just thought this was very nice since I have one less thing to worry
> about. Starting the web server will start the back-end processes and
> stopping the web server will stop the back-end processes.
>
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 3:12 AM, Denis F. Latypoff <denis@gostats.ru>
> wrote:
> > Hello jlist9,
> >
> > Tuesday, October 20, 2009, 3:26:24 PM, you 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?
> >
> > What if I have nginx running on server A, and many fastcgi backends
> > running on servers B-Z?
> >
> >> Thanks,
> >> Jack
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Best regards,
> > Denis mailto:denis@gostats.ru
> >
> >
> >
>
>