Spreadlogd is a daemon to log to file, messages from spread toolkit clients. If you kill -HUP or kill the spreadlogd process, it will not actually process the signal until after it has received its next message from Spread. You can move you log files to new names and then kill -HUP and it will reopen the log files. This is useful for seamless log rotation without losing any messages. Spread is really cool. It is a poweful group communication toolkit developed at the Center for Networking and Distributed Systems at the Johns Hopkins University (http://www.spread.org/ and http://www.cnds.jhu.edu/, respectively).