Supervisortype

Supervisortype is a term used in fault-tolerant software design to describe the classification of a supervisory component that manages one or more worker tasks or processes. A supervisortype defines how the supervisor observes its children, decides when to restart them, and determines the limits of its fault-handling policies. In practice, it is used to organize resilience strategies within a system's architecture rather than to specify a single implementation.

Key characteristics of a supervisortype include scope (do the rules apply to a single process or a subtree of processes), restart policy (how and when to restart failed children), and shutdown behavior (graceful vs abrupt termination). It may also specify resource limits, error propagation rules, and recovery semantics across failure domains. In many frameworks, supervisortype is expressed as a category or enum that guides how supervisory trees are constructed and how exceptions are escalated.

In contemporary software design, supervisortypes are closely associated with the supervisor pattern and with actor-based models. For example, many systems implement a hierarchy of supervisors that apply strategies such as one-for-one, rest-for-one, or one-for-all when a child fails. The exact terminology and available strategies vary by framework, but the underlying idea remains consistent: a supervisor type encapsulates a policy for fault containment and recovery.

Designers select a supervisortype based on reliability goals, latency considerations, and the expected failure modes of workers. Clear definition of the supervisortype helps maintain predictable recovery behavior and reduces the risk of cascading failures.