Am 30. Nov, 2001 schwätzte David Mandala so:

> By sending the USR1 signal each child will finish handling the customer so
> to speak and then die before another come in. This could take as much as 10
> minutes or more for every old apache process to die and be changed to the
> new one. Therefore no customers see any bad things. Now if there is a need
> to kill the server quickly then TERM and/or HUP is the correct call to use.

Cool info. Didn't know about the USR1 behavior.

> The information below is directly copied from the Apache
> http://httpd.apache.org/docs/stopping.html manual page and clearly explains
> it all:

Note the caveat found here:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/programs/apachectl.html


     graceful    Gracefully restarts the Apache daemon by sending
                 it  a SIGUSR1.  If the daemon is not running, it
                 is started.  This differs from a normal  restart
                 in  that  currently  open  connections  are  not
                 aborted.  A side effect is that  old  log  files
                 will not be closed immediately.  This means that
                 if used in a log rotation script, a  substantial
                 delay  may  be  necessary to ensure that the old
                 log files are  closed  before  processing  them.
                 This command automatically checks the configura-
                 tion files via configtest before initiating  the
                 restart to make sure Apache doesn't die.

debian uses the apachectl script and uses graceful for reload. restart,
however, do the stop start dance. That's probably good behavior.

ciao,

der.hans
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