Hello there,
I’m sorry for not updating my blog more often. Now is the time to use the best excuse in the world that will make me look like a busy businessman and you will all be impressed. Here we go : I don’t have the time!
I know a lot of you are using GOD to keep your daemons / processes alive. I really don’t want to say bad things about GOD (I can’t because I never tried it)… but I DID read some really nasty things about it and somehow it convinced me to try an alternative : Monit.
The biggest advantage with Monit is that it is written in C instead of ruby… so it doesn’t leak and it appears to be faster. It is also pretty easy to configure. Here is a very basic monit configuration file:

set daemon 60
set httpd port 2812 address localhost
     allow localhost
check process my_process
  with pidfile /home/apps/someapp/my_process.pid
  start program = "/home/apps/someapp/my_process start"
  stop program = "/home/apps/someapp/my_process stop"

Then, you start the monit daemon by typing : monit
It will poll the monit configuration file every minute (this is the set daemon 60 part) and will restart ‘my_process’ whenever it is not running. Of course this is an extremely simple use case and there are a lot more configuration options you can play with. Have a look at the documentation for more info.