It kinda depends on your domain and the way you structure your services. It's worth noting that, by saying "They throw 500 errors", you seem to specifically be

It kinda depends on your domain and the way you structure your services. It's worth noting that, by saying "They throw 500 errors", you seem to specifically be talking about a single class of "service", ie web services, but the scope of "networked things that need to be resilient" is obviously much larger. > Would it be better to bring the whole server down and have the operating system restart it? It depends entirely on how you've structured your system. Some systems attempt to not-crash, but then cause repercussions on downstream dependents by attempting to continue when they shouldn't have. In those cases, it's better to just give up and die rather than erroneously continuing. I'm not an Erlang user, but I _think_ the ideology is more along the lines of accepting the certainty that you haven't and won't account for all failure scenarios and embrace crashing as an inevitability and working backwards. You know it will certainly crash, so become really good at recovering from a crash.