Hi Jonathan,
Thanks for the feedback
2.) You're going through a lot of effort to generate a pidfile, when
it's completely unnecesary for systemd services.
I tried not using a pidfile initially and this that case things would
start up and run correctly for a short period but then systemd would put the service into a failed state and kill it off. Based on the documentation below I believe that systemd was "guessing" the Main PID wrong, and so thought the service was dead and killing off all child processes. "GuessMainPID=
Takes a boolean value that specifies whether systemd should try to guess the main PID of a service if it cannot be determined reliably. This option is ignored unless Type=forking is set and PIDFile= is unset because for the other types or with an explicitly configured PID file, the main PID is always known. The guessing algorithm might come to incorrect conclusions if a daemon consists of more than one process. If the main PID cannot be determined, failure detection and automatic restarting of a service will not work reliably. Defaults to yes"