Writing The Process Manager (Cont.)

• Since the process manager is the parent of everything else (so it could catch CHLD signals) - it better be very stable - or it'll crash and bring the entire system down.
• Since we had a limited amount of machines, it must be possible to run two instances of the system on the same machine easily.
• Some people will say "use a bunch of shell scripts" - I find it a crappy solution, which is hard to maintain, and is slow to respond in case of problems (ever wrote a signal-handler in a shell script?).
• Important note: the reason to split the system into several processes was in order to increase stability - a bug that causes the compression analyzer to crash shouldn't bring the communications code down.

Originally written by guy keren