Supervisor Death Kills Workers?

[David Mercer]

As workers are linked to their supervisors, the behaviour of a supervisor,
therefore, is to kill its workers if it itself dies.  I had thought that it
was the job - and about the only job - of the supervisor to restart workers
when they stop, not to stop the workers if not working under supervision.
To my thinking, this introduces a single point of failure where previously
there wasn't: if the top-level supervisor terminates, then you've lost your
entire system.

 

Am I misunderstanding supervision trees and the supervisor behaviour, or is
there a reason for introducing a single point of failure into what was a
distributed fault-tolerant system?

 

Thanks for your help in understanding this.  I was wondering about this all
weekend.

 

Cheers,

 

David