Supervisor

A supervisor manages an ordered list of processes and supervisors child.

The duties of a supervisor are:

1. monitor the running status of its children and apply the restart policies in case of failures;
2. shutdown all the processes in an orderly and deterministic way;

A supervisor has a name and a list of supervised elements:

function foo(self::Supervised, n::Int=100)
    # ...
end

function bar(self::Supervised, name::String="")
    # ...
end

processes = [process(foo, args(10, )),
             process(bar, args("myname", ))]

supervisor("my_supervisor", processes)

Supervisor options

supervisor(name::String, specs=Spec[];
           intensity=1,
           period=5,
           strategy=:one_for_one,
           restart=:transient,
           wait=true)

It is possible to control the number of restarts of supervised tasks by the two options intensity and period.

If a greater number of restarts than intensity value occur in a time frame set by period, the supervisor terminates all the child tasks.

The intention of the restart mechanism is to prevent a situation where a process repeatedly dies for the same reason, only to be restarted again.

If options intensity and period are not given, they default to 1 and 5, respectively.

julia> using Visor
julia> function tsk1(task)
           sleep(1)
           return error("[$(task.id)]: critical failure")
       endtsk1 (generic function with 1 method)
julia> function tsk2(task)
           count = 0
           while count < 8
               println("[$(task.id)]: do something ...")
               sleep(0.5)
               count += 1
           end
       endtsk2 (generic function with 1 method)
julia> function main(task)
           for i in 1:5
               println("[$(task.id)]: step $i")
               sleep(1.5)
           end
       endmain (generic function with 1 method)
julia> sv = supervisor("mysupervisor", [process(tsk1), process(tsk2)]);
julia> supervise([process(main), sv]);[main]: step 1
[tsk2]: do something ...
[tsk2]: do something ...
┌ Warning: [tsk1]: ErrorException("[tsk1]: critical failure")
└ @ Visor ~/work/Visor.jl/Visor.jl/src/Visor.jl:1464
[tsk2]: do something ...
[main]: step 2
[tsk2]: do something ...
┌ Warning: [tsk1]: ErrorException("[tsk1]: critical failure")
└ @ Visor ~/work/Visor.jl/Visor.jl/src/Visor.jl:1464
┌ Warning: [tsk1]: reached max of 1 restarts in 5 secs period
└ @ Visor ~/work/Visor.jl/Visor.jl/src/Visor.jl:551
[tsk2]: do something ...
[main]: step 3
[tsk2]: do something ...
[tsk2]: do something ...
[tsk2]: do something ...
[main]: step 4
[main]: step 5

The strategy option defines the restart policy and it is one of:

• :one_for_one
• :one_for_all
• :rest_for_one
• :one_terminate_all

The design of the restart strategies :one_for_one, :one_for_all and :rest_for_one follows Erlang behavoir, see Erlang documentation for a comprehensive explanation.

The strategy :one_terminate_all terminate all supervised processes as soon as the first one terminate, either normally or by an exception.

Finally there can be two types of life span for supervisor: :permanent and :transient.

The :transient supervisor terminates when there are left no children to supervise, whereas the :permanent supervisor may outlives its supervised children.

The wait option controls if supervise blocks or return control. In the latter case the caller have to wait for supervision termination.