Re: respawning Servers, why would a Server die?
1) User kills the Server process via an OS tool. Why would they do that?
a) By mistake. Restarting is helpful in this case.
b) Because the user doesn't understand our admin interfaces. Here restarting is helpful since they will need to learn to use the management interfaces if they actually want the server to stay dead. :)
c) Because the DC is dead and can't be revived or the SM is misbehaving, so the user can't shut down or restart the server via the normal admin interface. Here we don't know whether the user wanted a restart.
2) Some other fatal error occurs. Should we let a human try and figure out what happened? Maybe bringing the server back up will just increase instability in the overall domain.
Looking at that, I see no clear answer whether restarting makes sense. So, how about punting? Add a auto-restart flag to the <server> element. Default is true.