Don't start Supervisors under GenServers

November 12, 2020

While at work I was reading through the exq library I stumbled upon an issue that discussed the perils of running a Supervisor under a GenServer. Specifically Ben Wilson calls out the following:

  • "There is less guarantee provided by the supervision tree as the process might exit and the supervisor will not have terminated its children."
  • "This can lead to problems if the supervisors children are named because the named children might still exist when a restart occurs higher up the tree (above the process calling start_link in its init/1"
  • "you lose some advanced OTP features, like code reloading, as process modules are discovered by walking the supervision tree"

To my surprise the codebase I was working in, was using this pattern. Thankfully I was able to hunt down some resources that help to show how you should be modelling your process tree. The gist of it is this:

  • Your process tree is composed of either worker nodes or supervisor nodes
  • Nodes with children must be supervisors
  • Leaf nodes must be workers (in our case GenServers)

Here's a nice graphic that was taken from little-otp that helps to visualize everything from above.

hao2 01

References

  1. Parent library
  2. Little Elixir and OTP: Implementing a Supervisor
  3. exq library
  4. exq github issue

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