What is Supervisor?
According to its official documentation, “Supervisor is a client/server system that allows its users to monitor and control a number of processes on UNIX-like operating systems.” In practice, Supervisor is one of the most useful tools used by administrators to manage processes in an efficient way, grouping processes into logical units according to their needs.
Supervisor in Action
Thanks to Supervisor, admins can conveniently stop, start, or restart processes (or groups of processes). Moreover, since the OS signals Supervisor when a process terminates, it can be configured to restart the process to keep the service available automatically.
Supervisor can accomplish all this and more thanks to four components, supervisord installed on the server and responsible for responding to client commands, supervisorctl the command line client that routes instructions to the server, and a simple web server and XML-RPC interface to interact with Supervisor via HTTP.
Why Use Supervisor?
There is no doubt that Supervisor is a fundamental part of the admin toolbox. This popularity is due to its multiple benefits, among which stand out:
- Simplicity. Supervisor is easily configurable using an INI-style config file.
- Convenience. Instead of monitoring and managing processes, one by one Supervisor gives you the advantage of a centralized place to stop, start, and monitor all your processes.
- Efficient. Supervisor is lightweight and fast because it does not daemonize or rely on PID files. Each thread is started via fork/exec, and it is the OS itself that signals Supervisor of the status of those processes.
- Extensible. Supervisor is completely written in Python, so it can be modified at convenience.
Supervisor Hosting For Developers
Administering a Linux server is not an easy task. There are many moving parts, multiple aspects to monitor and manage to maintain optimal performance. At FullHost, our mission is to provide you with as many tools as possible to make your job easier; that’s why we include Supervisor in our Managed Cloud Servers.
Contact one of our experts today and start enjoying all the benefits that only FullHost can offer you.
