Comment by greggyb

Not so much about timeouts, but related in that it is based around managing children processes:

The lineage of tools descending from daemontools for service management is worth exploring:

daemontools: http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html

runit: https://smarden.org/runit/

s6: https://skarnet.org/software/s6/

dinit: https://davmac.org/projects/dinit/