Respawn needs a retry time

[Marius Karthaus]

Hello Scott, all,

I'm not a very good C programmer so I am not able to help out, sorry. I 
do think that being able to specify the retry time is a great feature. 
Just a "respawn retry" stanza may not be as flexible, as this will 
probably need to default to something like 5 minutes like it did with 
the 'old' inittab way of doing this.  In my situation for instance it 
would be great if I could get upstart to try once every 5 seconds until 
it works. ('respawn 1 5 5')

Currently what I've done to solve my problem is add a crontab line that 
calls 'telinit 2' every minute. This will cause upstart to reload the 
services that are down. (faking 'respawn 1 5 60', which is ok for now)

The current situation even has a small denial of service possibility in 
it, although it is nitpicking. But if someone named 'joe' sets his 
password to 'o' he will probably be able to log in to and out of the 
local consoles quicker than 5 times in 10 seconds causing getty to die 
permanently.

Regards,
Marius Karthaus

Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Sun, 2008-06-15 at 15:06 +0200, Marius Karthaus wrote:
>
>   
>> I feel I'm missing an option for respawn: the retry time.
>>
>> If I define a service in upstart, it will try to respawn the service 
>> with the set limits, for instance (default) by retrying 10 times in 5 
>> seconds. Now let's assume that a program is unable to start because of 
>> whatever reason during just 1 second. In that time, depending on how 
>> fast the program exits it will be tried 10 times and the program will 
>> never ever be started again by upstart. To me this is bad behavior.
>> I think upstart should try a couple of times, complain that it is unable 
>> to start the process, wait for some time for the problem to be sorted 
>> out and try to respawn again.
>>
>> So I propose a third option to the respawn stanza, the retry time. That 
>> way we can define a much more sensible respawn strategy.
>>
>>     
> A third option, or a "respawn retry" stanza?
>
> Would not be hard to do, and would be a good miniature project for
> someone.
>
> Patches welcome :-)
>
> Scott
>