App to manage/track/spawn processes

[bruce]

Hi.

Not really a Fedora question, but maybe someone has thoughts on how to
implement this.

I've got a situation where I'm looking to have a process where I spawn off a
number of external apps. I'd like an app to manage the entire process of
creating/tracking the child apps. So basically, I'd like to be able to fire
off 10 copies of the child app, track the health/status of the child copies
while they're running, abd be able to continually fire off additional copies
of the child app when the number of running child apps gets below a given
threshold.

Of course I'd like to know if I'm already running a given child app, so I
only have a child app with the same input args running once. I'd also like
to be able to track when a child app is halted/stuck, so I can gracefully
kill it, and restart it...

Any thoughts on any kind of open source app that does this, or gets close...
I started to architect a quick solution to this when I couldn't find
anything on the 'net, but figured I'f ping here as well.

Comments/Thoughts are good.

thanks!!