Daemon Showdown: Upstart vs. Runit vs. Systemd vs. Circus vs. God Mar 8th, 2013 We write a lot of daemons: programs which run on servers in the background, like an HTTP server, or a database. Once we've written the programs, though, we have to run them, and running programs as daemons is surprisingly heavy on details; it's fraught with perils for the unwary. If you go the traditional Unix way, you