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-
- <manualpage metafile="stopping.xml.meta">
-
- <title>Stopping and Restarting</title>
-
- <summary>
- <p>This document covers stopping and restarting Apache on
- Unix-like systems. Windows NT, 2000 and XP users should see
- <a href="platform/windows.html#winsvc">Running Apache as a
- Service</a> and Windows 9x and ME users should see <a
- href="platform/windows.html#wincons">Running Apache as a
- Console Application</a> for information on how to control
- Apache on those platforms.</p>
- </summary>
-
- <seealso><a href="programs/httpd.html">httpd</a></seealso>
- <seealso><a href="programs/apachectl.html">apachectl</a></seealso>
-
- <section id="introduction"><title>Introduction</title>
-
- <p>In order to stop or restart Apache, you must send a signal to
- the running <code>httpd</code> processes. There are two ways to
- send the signals. First, you can use the unix <code>kill</code>
- command to directly send signals to the processes. You will
- notice many <code>httpd</code> executables running on your system,
- but you should not send signals to any of them except the parent,
- whose pid is in the <directive
- module="mpm_common">PidFile</directive>. That is to say you
- shouldn't ever need to send signals to any process except the
- parent. There are three signals that you can send the parent:
- <code><a href="#term">TERM</a></code>,
- <code><a href="#hup">HUP</a></code>, and
- <code><a href="#graceful">USR1</a></code>, which
- will be described in a moment.</p>
-
- <p>To send a signal to the parent you should issue a command
- such as:</p>
-
- <example>kill -TERM `cat /usr/local/apache2/logs/httpd.pid`</example>
-
- <p>The second method of signaling the <code>httpd</code> processes
- is to use the <code>-k</code> command line options: <code>stop</code>,
- <code>restart</code>, and <code>graceful</code>,
- as described below. These are arguments to the <a
- href="programs/httpd.html">httpd</a> binary, but we recommend that
- you send them using the <a
- href="programs/apachectl.html">apachectl</a> control script, which
- will pass them through to <code>httpd</code>.</p>
-
- <p>After you have signaled <code>httpd</code>, you can read about
- its progress by issuing:</p>
-
- <example>tail -f /usr/local/apache2/logs/error_log</example>
-
- <p>Modify those examples to match your <directive
- module="core">ServerRoot</directive> and <directive
- module="mpm_common">PidFile</directive> settings.</p>
- </section>
-
- <section id="term"><title>Stop Now</title>
-
- <dl><dt>Signal: TERM</dt>
- <dd><code>apachectl -k stop</code></dd>
- </dl>
-
- <p>Sending the <code>TERM</code> or <code>stop</code> signal to
- the parent causes it to immediately attempt to kill off all of its
- children. It may take it several seconds to complete killing off
- its children. Then the parent itself exits. Any requests in
- progress are terminated, and no further requests are served.</p>
- </section>
-
- <section id="graceful"><title>Graceful Restart</title>
-
- <dl><dt>Signal: USR1</dt>
- <dd><code>apachectl -k graceful</code></dd>
- </dl>
-
- <p>The <code>USR1</code> or <code>graceful</code> signal causes
- the parent process to <em>advise</em> the children to exit after
- their current request (or to exit immediately if they're not
- serving anything). The parent re-reads its configuration files and
- re-opens its log files. As each child dies off the parent replaces
- it with a child from the new <em>generation</em> of the
- configuration, which begins serving new requests immediately.</p>
-
- <note>On certain platforms that do not allow <code>USR1</code> to
- be used for a graceful restart, an alternative signal may be used (such
- as <code>WINCH</code>). The command <code>apachectl graceful</code>
- will send the right signal for your platform.</note>
-
- <p>This code is designed to always respect the process control
- directive of the MPMs, so the number of processes and threads
- available to serve clients will be maintained at the appropriate
- values throughout the restart process. Furthermore, it respects
- <directive module="mpm_common">StartServers</directive> in the
- following manner: if after one second at least <directive
- module="mpm_common">StartServers</directive> new children have not
- been created, then create enough to pick up the slack. Hence the
- code tries to maintain both the number of children appropriate for
- the current load on the server, and respect your wishes with the
- <directive>StartServers</directive> parameter.</p>
-
- <p>Users of the <module>mod_status</module>
- will notice that the server statistics are <strong>not</strong>
- set to zero when a <code>USR1</code> is sent. The code was
- written to both minimize the time in which the server is unable
- to serve new requests (they will be queued up by the operating
- system, so they're not lost in any event) and to respect your
- tuning parameters. In order to do this it has to keep the
- <em>scoreboard</em> used to keep track of all children across
- generations.</p>
-
- <p>The status module will also use a <code>G</code> to indicate
- those children which are still serving requests started before
- the graceful restart was given.</p>
-
- <p>At present there is no way for a log rotation script using
- <code>USR1</code> to know for certain that all children writing
- the pre-restart log have finished. We suggest that you use a
- suitable delay after sending the <code>USR1</code> signal
- before you do anything with the old log. For example if most of
- your hits take less than 10 minutes to complete for users on
- low bandwidth links then you could wait 15 minutes before doing
- anything with the old log.</p>
-
- <note>If your configuration file has errors
- in it when you issue a restart then your parent will not
- restart, it will exit with an error. In the case of graceful
- restarts it will also leave children running when it exits.
- (These are the children which are "gracefully exiting" by
- handling their last request.) This will cause problems if you
- attempt to restart the server -- it will not be able to bind to
- its listening ports. Before doing a restart, you can check the
- syntax of the configuration files with the <code>-t</code>
- command line argument (see <a
- href="programs/httpd.html">httpd</a>). This still will not
- guarantee that the server will restart correctly. To check the
- semantics of the configuration files as well as the syntax, you
- can try starting <code>httpd</code> as a non-root user. If there are no
- errors it will attempt to open its sockets and logs and fail
- because it's not root (or because the currently running <code>httpd</code>
- already has those ports bound). If it fails for any other
- reason then it's probably a config file error and the error
- should be fixed before issuing the graceful restart.</note>
- </section>
-
- <section id="hup"><title>Restart Now</title>
-
- <dl><dt>Signal: HUP</dt>
- <dd><code>apachectl -k restart</code></dd>
- </dl>
-
- <p>Sending the <code>HUP</code> or <code>restart</code> signal to
- the parent causes it to kill off its children like in
- <code>TERM</code>, but the parent doesn't exit. It re-reads its
- configuration files, and re-opens any log files. Then it spawns a
- new set of children and continues serving hits.</p>
-
- <p>Users of <module>mod_status</module>
- will notice that the server statistics are set to zero when a
- <code>HUP</code> is sent.</p>
-
- <note>If your configuration file has errors in it when you issue a
- restart then your parent will not restart, it will exit with an
- error. See above for a method of avoiding this.</note>
- </section>
-
- <section id="race"><title>Appendix: signals and race conditions</title>
-
- <p>Prior to Apache 1.2b9 there were several <em>race
- conditions</em> involving the restart and die signals (a simple
- description of race condition is: a time-sensitive problem, as
- in if something happens at just the wrong time it won't behave
- as expected). For those architectures that have the "right"
- feature set we have eliminated as many as we can. But it should
- be noted that there still do exist race conditions on certain
- architectures.</p>
-
- <p>Architectures that use an on disk <directive
- module="mpm_common">ScoreBoardFile</directive> have the potential
- to corrupt their scoreboards. This can result in the "bind:
- Address already in use" (after <code>HUP</code>) or "long lost
- child came home!" (after <code>USR1</code>). The former is a fatal
- error, while the latter just causes the server to lose a
- scoreboard slot. So it might be advisable to use graceful
- restarts, with an occasional hard restart. These problems are very
- difficult to work around, but fortunately most architectures do
- not require a scoreboard file. See the <directive
- module="mpm_common">ScoreBoardFile</directive> documentation for a
- architecture uses it.</p>
-
- <p>All architectures have a small race condition in each child
- involving the second and subsequent requests on a persistent
- HTTP connection (KeepAlive). It may exit after reading the
- request line but before reading any of the request headers.
- There is a fix that was discovered too late to make 1.2. In
- theory this isn't an issue because the KeepAlive client has to
- expect these events because of network latencies and server
- timeouts. In practice it doesn't seem to affect anything either
- -- in a test case the server was restarted twenty times per
- second and clients successfully browsed the site without
- getting broken images or empty documents. </p>
- </section>
-
- </manualpage>
-