Michael Peters <mpet...@plusthree.com> writes: > Looking at this from a different perspective, have you tried writing a > monitoring program that looks for updates to the database and then > would restart the appropriate apache servers on the various > machines. It would do them one at a time (taking them out of rotation > from your load balancer). It wouldn't be immediate response, could > definitely be done in under a minute.
Thanks Michael, I thought about that. It is probably what I will do if I can't get something a little cleaner. I have had mixed experiences in the past with automatically restarting Apache after a configuration change. It is very easy to end up with something unexpected in the configuration, which causes the configuration to fail, which causes apache to stop. And with a cluster, that would happen on all hosts. Now, ideally, I wouldn't make any errors in my configuration code and this would never be an issue. But I have learned the hard way that making things as foolproof as possible is the best way to protect myself from my own foolishness. :-) When I have done this in the past, I have done it with generating configuration files, so of course one misplaced newline or angle-bracket will kill the server. Maybe generating the configuration directly from a <Perl> section is more robust? Maybe there are ways to catch configuration errors in that layer and handle them cleanly without preventing Apache from starting? Any suggestions in this area would be appreciated. Thanks again! -----Scott.