This module implements a process which supervises a set of other processes, referred to as its children. These child processes can be either workers (i.e., processes that do something useful in your application) or other supervisors. In this way, supervisors may be used to build a hierarchical process structure called a supervision tree, which provides a convenient structure for building fault tolerant software.

Unless otherwise stated, all client functions in this module will cause the calling process to exit unless the specified supervisor process can be resolved.

Supervision Principles

A supervisor is responsible for starting, stopping and monitoring its child processes so as to keep them alive by restarting them when necessary.

The supervisor's children are defined as a list of child specifications (see ChildSpec). When a supervisor is started, its children are started in left-to-right (insertion order) according to this list. When a supervisor stops (or exits for any reason), it will stop all its children before exiting. Child specs can be added to the supervisor after it has started, either on the left or right of the existing list of child specs.

Restart Strategies

Supervisors are initialised with a RestartStrategy, which describes how the supervisor should respond to a child that exits and should be restarted (see below for the rules governing child restart eligibility). Each restart strategy comprises a RestartMode and RestartLimit, which govern how the restart should be handled, and the point at which the supervisor should give up and stop itself respectively.

With the exception of the RestartOne strategy, which indicates that the supervisor will restart only the one individual failing child, each strategy describes a way to select the set of children that should be restarted if any child fails. The RestartAll strategy, as its name suggests, selects all children, whilst the RestartLeft and RestartRight strategies select all children to the left or right of the failed child, in insertion (i.e., startup) order.

Note that a branch restart will only occur if the child that exited is meant to be restarted. Since Temporary children are never restarted and Transient children are not restarted if they exit normally, in both these circumstances we leave the remaining supervised children alone. Otherwise, the failing child is always included in the branch to be restarted.

For a hypothetical set of children a through d, the following pseudocode demonstrates how the restart strategies work.

let children = [a..d]
let failure = c
restartsFor RestartOne   children failure = [c]
restartsFor RestartAll   children failure = [a,b,c,d]
restartsFor RestartLeft  children failure = [a,b,c]
restartsFor RestartRight children failure = [c,d]

Branch Restarts

We refer to a restart (strategy) that involves a set of children as a branch restart from now on. The behaviour of branch restarts can be further refined by the RestartMode with which a RestartStrategy is parameterised. The RestartEach mode treats each child sequentially, first stopping the respective child process and then restarting it. Each child is stopped and started fully before moving on to the next, as the following imaginary example demonstrates for children [a,b,c]:

stop  a
start a
stop  b
start b
stop  c
start c

By contrast, RestartInOrder will first run through the selected list of children, stopping them. Then, once all the children have been stopped, it will make a second pass, to handle (re)starting them. No child is started until all children have been stopped, as the following imaginary example demonstrates:

stop  a
stop  b
stop  c
start a
start b
start c

Both the previous examples have shown children being stopped and started from left to right, but that is up to the user. The RestartMode data type's constructors take a RestartOrder, which determines whether the selected children will be processed from LeftToRight or RightToLeft.

Sometimes it is desireable to stop children in one order and start them in the opposite. This is typically the case when children are in some way dependent on one another, such that restarting them in the wrong order might cause the system to misbehave. For this scenarios, there is another RestartMode that will shut children down in the given order, but then restarts them in the reverse. Using RestartRevOrder mode, if we have children [a,b,c] such that b depends on a and c on b, we can stop them in the reverse of their startup order, but restart them the other way around like so:

RestartRevOrder RightToLeft

The effect will be thus:

stop  c
stop  b
stop  a
start a
start b
start c

Restart Intensity Limits

If a child process repeatedly crashes during (or shortly after) starting, it is possible for the supervisor to get stuck in an endless loop of restarts. In order prevent this, each restart strategy is parameterised with a RestartLimit that caps the number of restarts allowed within a specific time period. If the supervisor exceeds this limit, it will stop, stopping all its children (in left-to-right order) and exit with the reason ExitOther ReachedMaxRestartIntensity.

The MaxRestarts type is a positive integer, and together with a specified TimeInterval forms the RestartLimit to which the supervisor will adhere. Since a great many children can be restarted in close succession when a branch restart occurs (as a result of RestartAll, RestartLeft or RestartRight being triggered), the supervisor will track the operation as a single restart attempt, since otherwise it would likely exceed its maximum restart intensity too quickly.

Child Restart and Stop Policies

When the supervisor detects that a child has died, the RestartPolicy configured in the child specification is used to determin what to do. If the this is set to Permanent, then the child is always restarted. If it is Temporary, then the child is never restarted and the child specification is removed from the supervisor. A Transient child will be restarted only if it exits abnormally, otherwise it is left inactive (but its specification is left in place). Finally, an Intrinsic child is treated like a Transient one, except that if this kind of child exits normally, then the supervisor will also exit normally.

When the supervisor does stop a child process, the ChildStopPolicy provided with the ChildSpec determines how the supervisor should go about doing so. If this is StopImmediately, then the child will be killed without further notice, which means the child will not have an opportunity to clean up any internal state and/or release any held resources. If the policy is StopTimeout delay however, the child will be sent an exit signal instead, i.e., the supervisor will cause the child to exit via exit childPid ExitShutdown, and then will wait until the given delay for the child to exit normally. If this does not happen within the given delay, the supervisor will revert to the more aggressive StopImmediately policy and try again. Any errors that occur during a timed-out shutdown will be logged, however exit reasons resulting from StopImmediately are ignored.

Creating Child Specs

The ToChildStart typeclass simplifies the process of defining a ChildStart providing two default instances from which a ChildStart datum can be generated. The first, takes a Closure (Process ()), where the enclosed action (in the Process monad) is the actual (long running) code that we wish to supervise. In the case of a managed process, this is usually the server loop, constructed by evaluating some variant of ManagedProcess.serve.

The second instance supports returning a handle which can contain extra data about the child process - usually this is a newtype wrapper used by clients to communicate with the process.

When the supervisor spawns its child processes, they should be linked to their parent (i.e., the supervisor), such that even if the supervisor is killed abruptly by an asynchronous exception, the children will still be taken down with it, though somewhat less ceremoniously in that case. This behaviour is injected by the supervisor for any ChildStart built on Closure (Process ()) automatically, but the handle based approach requires that the Closure responsible for spawning does the linking itself.

Finally, we provide a simple shortcut to staticClosure, for consumers who've manually registered with the remote table and don't with to use tempate haskell (e.g. users of the Explicit closures API).

Supervision Trees & Supervisor Shutdown

To create a supervision tree, one simply adds supervisors below one another as children, setting the childType field of their ChildSpec to Supervisor instead of Worker. Supervision tree can be arbitrarilly deep, and it is for this reason that we recommend giving a Supervisor child an arbitrary length of time to stop, by setting the delay to Infinity or a very large TimeInterval.