Upvoting, because it's a great article. My own personal preferences (on systems where I don't have smf, upstart or launchd available-- e.g., production RHEL/Ce

Upvoting, because it's a great article. My own personal preferences (on systems where I don't have smf, upstart or launchd available-- e.g., production RHEL/CentOS machines) is daemontools. My only quibble with it is that the logging system it comes with has a fairly insane feature of fsyncing() on every write (which, if you run a service which spews a lot of logs to STDOUT, can seriously degrade performance). I'd really like to investigate runit as an alternative: http://smarden.org/runit http://smarden.org/runit (the site is down at the moment, but here's Google's archive: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ZPOjz5Z7k9IJ:smarden.org/runit/ http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:ZPOjz5Z7k9IJ:smarden.or...), but haven't yet.