Patent ID: 7558986

Claim:
A method comprising the steps of: detecting with a processor a crash of a client process running on the processor externally to the client process, wherein said detecting step comprises: maintaining proper termination flag data for all running client processes, wherein the proper termination flag data is maintained externally to the running client processes; setting a proper termination flag for the client process in response to a stop program executing a stop request on the client process; signaling a supervisory thread through invalidation of a handle identifying the client process, the supervisory thread generating an exit notification event in response to invalidation of the handle; receiving the exit notification event; checking whether the proper termination flag for the client process has been set prior to terminating; and determining whether the client process crashed based on the proper termination flag; and automatically executing a crash recovery plan with the processor to recover from the crash of the client process, wherein said executing of the crash recovery plan is performed based on the determining step.