This will also allow HAProxy to be brought into the fold if you're using Circus (http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/0.11.1/ http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/0.11.

This will also allow HAProxy to be brought into the fold if you're using Circus (http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/0.11.1/ http://circus.readthedocs.org/en/0.11.1/) for process monitoring. Probably not a big win in reliability, but I bet there are plenty of other things you can do with that (like parent mentioned)