[erlang-questions] to supervise or not to supervise

[steve ellis]

New to supervision trees and trying to figure out when to use them (and when
not to)...

I have bunch of spawned processes created through spawn_link. Want these
processes to say running indefinitely. If one exits in an error state, we
want to restart it N times. After N, we want to error log it, and stop
trying to restart it. Perfect job for a one_to_one supervisor right?

Well sort of. The problem is that when the max restarts for the error
process is reached, the supervisor terminates all its children and itself.
Ouch! (At least in our case). We'd rather that the supervisor just keep
supervising all the children that are ok and not swallow everything up.

The Design Principles appear to be saying that swallowing everything up is
what supervisors are supposed to do when max restarts is reached which
leaves me a little puzzled. Why would you want to kill the supervisor just
because a child process is causing trouble? Seems a little harsh.

Is this a case of me thinking supervisors are good for too many things? Is
it that our case is better handled by simply spawning these processes and
trapping exits on them, and restarting/error logging in the trap exit?

Thanks!

Steve
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