Erlang supervisor restart interval

Question

I have a supervisor with one_for_one restart strategy. Is it possible to set some time interval between child process restarting?

For example, the remote db crushed and I want to wait 10 seconds between restore connection attempts.

Answer 1

Actually, you could let the supervisor to immediately restart its children and implement what is called lazy initialization:

1. The supervisor (re)starts (immediately) the child (say, a gen_server)
2. The gen_server returns a 0 timeout in its init function
3. In the handle_info you do an active wait (your 10 seconds) to ensure the DB is properly initialized

This way, you ensure that all requests to the gen_server are processed after the DB is properly initialized.