joyent/node — comment on commit 1e3e6b7c15f39500d30d91846ad3621fb72aa91b
File:  line 0
By shtylman:

Question about cluster and the use case for why I would spin up multiple forks versus manage the processes myself. My goal is to have a zero downtime environment on one box. So for this, I usually run 2 of my server processes (on different ports, behind a proxy). Then when I want to do an upgrade or bounce the webserver, I bounce the first one (it stops accepting new connections and gracefully ends old ones). This means the proxy now uses the second one for all requests. I then bring back the first one and do the same with the second process (different port).

My understanding (and it may be wrong) is that with cluster, I will have the benefit of multiple processes, but I won't have the nice zero downtime capability because if I bounce the master process the children are also brought down and there is potentially a service gap. Is this correct?