Apache restart vs reload. Any way to make reload safe?

Discussion in 'General' started by simonb, Mar 27, 2017.

  1. simonb

    simonb New Member

    Using Apache 2.4.6 with ISPConfig 3.1 on Centos 7.
    I have the "Test apache configuration on restart" option checked in the Server Config->Web configuration page.

    Whenever anyone makes any change to a web site Apache is restarted which results in up to a few minutes downtime on a busy server. This is painful.

    From reading previous threads I understand that there are some situations where an Apache reload/configtest doesn't find the error and so the only sure-fire way to know if Apache is OK to run is to restart it.

    I have two questions about this:
    1. Has Apache improved its configtest recently? I was reading that incorrect SSH certificate paths are not detected but when I did a test a reload trapped this error no problem. In which case what configuration edge cases are still not detected by Apache configtest?
    2. Can we quantify what isn't detected by configtest by Apache so that it is it possible to fill in the blanks using an external pre-flight test on the config files? I wasn't able to find any list of "this is not detected by Apache configtest".
    Thanks & regards,
     

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