Why run a process as a daemon?

[sampsont]

I know what a daemon is but I can't find out...

What are the advantages of running as a daemon? Can someone explain the philosophy behind the decision to convert a process to a daemon?

Thanks!

[coopstah13]

Daemon (computer software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia might help some

[sampsont]

Helpful article but I'm still not sure what I'm losing if I just leave my program as a process instead of making it run as a daemon. Is it a resource issue? Does a daemon take fewer system resources since it's not connected to a tty?

My application is in an embedded box, taking data from A/D converters and performing DSP algorithms. The main application sends results to another application in the box, and other boxes via TCP sockets.

Is there something that should be making me think, "Wow, I need to be running these applications as daemons!", or "No, these should be left as processes."

The machine has no GUI but it needs to send messages to a log file and I think I would like to be able to send signals to each process.

Right now, I start these applications from a terminal. Eventually, they will be started from a script or maybe a master application.

Thanks!