Date: Sat, 3 Jan 1998 14:29:37 -0800 (PST)
From: Dean Gaudet <dgaudet@arctic.org>
To: new-httpd@apache.org
Subject: Re: latest redhat rpm of apache
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On Sat, 3 Jan 1998, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Ah! I'm talking about "how do you reset Apache (HUP or USR1) and know
> when the reset has finished?". Isn't that what this was all about in the
> first place?

That's one of the topics of discussion, yup :)  The other was how to kill
apache.

For log rotation I have two favs:

- reliable piped logs, just rename the logs and kill the logger, apache will
    restart it without a hiccough.  Ok, well, make sure your logger knows
    to close its input, and finish up cleanly.

- all children acquire a shared lock on the logs.  Rename the logs, send a
    USR1, and use the (as yet unwritten) waitlock program to acquire an
    exclusive lock, when the lock is acquired you know all the old
    children died.

I prefer the first because you know rotation will take a very short amount
of time.  In the second case if one of the children is busy sending a
bazillion Mb to a slow client the child could take a long time before
writing the one log entry. 

I really dislike HUP.  I'd love "graceful shutdown" as well. 

Oh btw, one of the concerns with piped logs is efficiency -- but it's
really just an O(1) issue I think, you can always run a half dozen piped
logs at the same time to distribute the load (and take advantage of
parallelism). 

Dean