I'm starting to run into a problem with the excellent supervisord. I currently use it to keep my Django processes alive on my VPS and now that I have a couple dozen managed processes I'm realising the shortcomings in the design of supervisord.

Supervisord is basically a friendly init system written in python. Rather than have to write init scripts in shell I just edit my supervisord.conf files, run supervisord as root, and all my long running processes (mostly Django instances) are started and managed by supervisord. This works well until I need to an additional process; currently reloading the config file means restarting the supervisor daemon which means restarting all the processes it controls (and a time wait/heavy server load while they all start simultaneously.)

I'm aware that there are some patches (twiddler) to allow you to dynamically add tasks without editing the .conf file. What I really want, however, is to be able to reload the conf file and only affect tasks that aren't already running (so adding a new process to the config file and reloading would only affect the newly added task.) It makes me very happy to see some discussion of this on the supervisor mailing list (see here, for example) towards the end of 2008. Of course now I'm just waiting anxiously for a 3.0 release - and wondering if I should stop complaining that my free ice-cream isn't being delivered fast enough and pitch in and help instead...