Supervisord can do all this and more. It's a full service process manager that can manage daemons in any language, including pools of FastCGI processes.

http://supervisord.org/

It has an XML-RPC interface and cmd line tool (supervisorctl) so you can send commands to the process manager as it's running (for example, starting and stopping a given process or process pool). It even has a language-agnostic event listening API so that you can monitor process manager events and take your own custom actions (such as sending yourselves alerts if a process dies).

Here's a sample config for managing a pool of 5 foo.pl processes and 2 bar.pl processes.

[fcgi-program:foo] socket=tcp://127.0.0.1:4000 process_name = %(program_name)s_%(process_num)s command = /path/to/foo.pl numprocs = 5

[fcgi-program:bar] socket=unix:///path/to/fcgi/socket process_name = %(program_name)s_%(process_num)s command = /path/to/bar.pl numprocs = 2

The FCGI spawning has not been officially released but it's well unit tested in the SVN repo. Just run easy_install http://svn.supervisord.org/supervisor/trunk/

On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 2:03 PM, mike <mike...@gmail.com> wrote: