Method and appartus for detecting an application process failure

Abstract

A method and apparatus for detecting an application process failure is described. In one embodiment, a process membership manager is opened with a first process. This action by the first process causes an instance indicia associated with the process membership manager to be assigned a first predefined value. The first process (i.e., parent process) then forks (or creates) a second process (i.e., child process). Once the second process is created, the instance indicia is changed to a second predefined value. In the event the second process fails, the second predefined value will change to reflect the process failure. Consequently, this change of the second predefined value causes a message, which provides notice of the second process failure, to be sent to a process membership manager.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.