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diff --git a/system/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.xml b/system/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.xml
index c24177d842..478d1bf714 100644
--- a/system/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.xml
+++ b/system/doc/design_principles/sup_princ.xml
@@ -175,6 +175,69 @@ SupFlags = #{intensity => MaxR, period => MaxT, ...}</code>
<p>The keys <c>intensity</c> and <c>period</c> are optional in the
supervisor flags map. If they are not given, they default
to <c>1</c> and <c>5</c>, respectively.</p>
+ <section>
+ <title>Tuning the intensity and period</title>
+ <p>The default values are 1 restart per 5 seconds. This was chosen to
+ be safe for most systems, even with deep supervision hierarchies,
+ but you will probably want to tune the settings for your particular
+ use case.</p>
+ <p>First, the intensity decides how big bursts of restarts you want
+ to tolerate. For example, you might want to accept a burst of at
+ most 5 or 10 attempts, even within the same second, if it results
+ in a successful restart.</p>
+ <p>Second, you need to consider the sustained failure rate, if
+ crashes keep happening but not often enough to make the supervisor
+ give up. If you set intensity to 10 and set the period as low as 1,
+ the supervisor will allow child processes to keep restarting up to
+ 10 times per second, forever, filling your logs with crash reports
+ until someone intervenes manually.</p>
+ <p>You should therefore set the period to be long enough that you can
+ accept that the supervisor keeps going at that rate. For example,
+ if you have picked an intensity value of 5, then setting the period
+ to 30 seconds will give you at most one restart per 6 seconds for
+ any longer period of time, which means that your logs won't fill up
+ too quickly, and you will have a chance to observe the failures and
+ apply a fix.</p>
+ <p>These choices depend a lot on your problem domain. If you don't
+ have real time monitoring and ability to fix problems quickly, for
+ example in an embedded system, you might want to accept at most
+ one restart per minute before the supervisor should give up and
+ escalate to the next level to try to clear the error automatically.
+ On the other hand, if it is more important that you keep trying
+ even at a high failure rate, you might want a sustained rate of as
+ much as 1-2 restarts per second.</p>
+ <p>Avoiding common mistakes:
+ <list type="bulleted">
+ <item>
+ <p>Do not forget to consider the burst rate. If you set intensity
+ to 1 and period to 6, it gives the same sustained error rate as
+ 5/30 or 10/60, but will not allow even 2 restart attempts in
+ quick succession. This is probably not what you wanted.</p>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <p>Do not set the period to a very high value if you want to
+ tolerate bursts. If you set intensity to 5 and period to 3600
+ (one hour), the supervisor will allow a short burst of 5
+ restarts, but then gives up if it sees another single restart
+ almost an hour later. You probably want to regard those crashes
+ as separate incidents, so setting the period to 5 or 10 minutes
+ will be more reasonable.</p>
+ </item>
+ <item>
+ <p>If your application has multiple levels of supervision, then
+ do not simply set the restart intensities to the same values on
+ all levels. Keep in mind that the total number of restarts
+ (before the top level supervisor gives up and terminates the
+ application) will be the product of the intensity values of all
+ the supervisors above the failing child process.</p>
+ <p>For example, if the top level allows 10 restarts, and the next
+ level also allows 10, a crashing child below that level will be
+ restarted 100 times, which is probably excessive. Allowing at
+ most 3 restarts for the top level supervisor might be a better
+ choice in this case.</p>
+ </item>
+ </list></p>
+ </section>
</section>
<section>