[erlang-questions] simple_one_for_one supervisor - what happens at restart? (also: gen_tcp)

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 05/14/2016 09:46 AM, Chandru wrote:
> On 14 May 2016 at 00:59, Ryan Stewart <zzantozz@REDACTED
> <mailto:zzantozz@REDACTED>> wrote:
>
>     Oliver: there is no restart for children under a simple 1-1
>     supervisor as documented under Supervision Principles at
>     http://erlang.org/doc/man/supervisor.html#id243029
>
>     Otoh, I have to strongly disagree with Chandru about there being "no
>     point" in supervising a connection process. Depending on the nature
>     of your application, there can be a *huge* benefit in supervision,
>     which is orderly shutdown. With a proper supervisory tree, you can
>     ensure that all connection processes have a chance to finish their
>     work and shut down cleanly when you stop your application.
>
>
> Cleanup can be done in the terminate callback if you use
> process_flag(trap_exit, true). You need to supervise a process primarily
> if you want it *restarted*, not for cleanup. Yes, you do have orderly
> shutdown mechanisms if the number of restarts exceed a "normal" value,
> but that is not the situation here.

This is bad advice. Cleanup should be done in a separate process, 
otherwise sending a kill signal sent to the wrong process will leave 
things dirty.

> Oliver has a server process to which clients connect. He does not need a
> supervisor for this because it is up to the client to reconnect if a
> connection is lost.

This is incorrect.

The primary function of supervisors is to provide a hierarchy of 
processes belonging to an application. With such a hierarchy it becomes 
possible to find and query information about any single process in your 
system in a standard manner.

Secondary functions of supervisors include restarting, reporting (with 
SASL) and upgrades. But they're entirely optional.

Having processes run without being attached to a supervisor is a big 
mistake, because they either become invisible, or force you to implement 
a non-standard way to find them. This makes introspecting a system more 
complex than it should be.

The only acceptable use for non-supervised processes is to perform 
asynchronous calls to functions. Those processes however should be 
relatively short-lived, and you should really make sure that they can't 
get stuck indefinitely.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu
Author of The Erlanger Playbook,
A book about software development using Erlang