This has probably been discussed here before, and if it has I'd like to know the reasons why it's a bad idea. Anyway, I've been working on a graceful stop mechanism for httpd, which is reasonably trivial to work in - the problem is that there are no portable signal numbers left (or am I wrong in that?) which means one has to go.
Why does graceful restart exist? Wouldn't it be better to have a graceful stop, and then just start a new instance? This would mean; * The existing behaviour of a graceful restart would be more-or-less preserved, httpd would be restarted without dropping clients. Though there would be issues with things like mod_perl/php/python persistent variables, and maybe a small window where requests are dropped. * httpd could be upgraded without dropping clients That last reason is my reason, right now when I need to upgrade httpd my only option is to kill httpd to free up port 80, this means kicking off a few thousand users who are in the middle of some very lengthy downloads. Since we use off-peak times like the weekend for doing things like this, this is really bad for dialup users - many of whom leave a long multi-day download running on a Friday - and arnt amused when they get back to the office on the Monday to find I killed it. But basically, graceful stop is trivially doable - it's the behaviour os most other daemons (things like sshd for example), it allows for graceful restarts, it allows graceful upgrades. But then, maybe I'm missing something, please enlighten me :) -- Colm MacCárthaigh Public Key: [EMAIL PROTECTED]