socket activation is nice, but i dont think its intention is for something like this. if your app automatically quits after 5 minutes, and it takes a few seconds to start because initialization in node is synchronous, then this is just kind of weird

monit is great because you can get emails if your app goes down, it monitors files and all kinds of other stuff. you could easily use socket activation with monit so that a crashing node process drops as few connections as possible by passing along the fd to another node process, but then if you are going to do this you might as well use cluster and fork your node process.

tldr; many ways to skin a cat, but turning off your node process because it is idle is kind of weird because it has implications for the first visitor, and it shouldnt just be reached for as a standard way of running node