We see a vary similar issue with supervisor 3.0r1-1+deb8u1 on Debian 8.9, even though the `restart` command seem to look alright (see below).
Restarting the service fails (when the service is up beforehand), because the Supervisor daemon seens to need some time to shut down. Stopping and starting works fine, provided there passes some time between their execution: $ sudo service supervisor restart Job for supervisor.service failed. See 'systemctl status supervisor.service' and 'journalctl -xn' for details. $ sudo service supervisor start $ sudo service supervisor stop && sleep 1 && sudo service supervisor start ``` # FILE: /etc/init.d/supervisor restart) echo -n "Restarting $DESC: " start-stop-daemon --stop --quiet --oknodo --pidfile $PIDFILE [ -n "$DODTIME" ] && sleep $DODTIME start-stop-daemon --start --quiet --pidfile $PIDFILE \ --startas $DAEMON -- $DAEMON_OPTS echo "$NAME." ;; ```