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Sender: "Craig McClanahan" <cmcclanahan@mytownnet.com>
Message-ID: <3794977D.59A7CA42@mytownnet.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jul 1999 15:36:29 +0000
From: "Craig R. McClanahan" <cmcclanahan@mytownnet.com>
Organization: MyTown Network, Incorporated
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To: tomcat-dev@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Re: request for review: server/config discussion
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Ben Laurie wrote:

> "Craig R. McClanahan" wrote:
> > My single biggest gripe about Apache (or Netscape Enterprise Server, and I'm sure lots of others),
> > no matter now good it is at what it does, is the fact that you have to restart the server for the
> > most trivial configuration file changes.  To me, that's not the way things should work -- it should
> > be possible to make incremental changes to existing configurations, at least to some level, without
> > global restart being required.  This doesn't seem to be a high priority for most server
> > developers (and I'm talking to myself here as well -- Apache JServ 1.1-DEV still requires restarts
> > on config changes), but it sure does matter in environments where a server restart can be very
> > disruptive to lots of users.
>
> a) Apache supports "graceful" restarts for this reason.

The Apache source code is pretty dense, but it looks like a graceful restart still kills all the child
httpd processes and recreates them.  Among other things, that seems to mean all the modules go through
their initialization lifecycle again.

>
> b) Supporting incremental changes could get pretty complicated, because
> of cached derived information. I suppose simply blowing away all the
> caches is feasible, though.
>

Speaking as an author of server-side stuff as well (Apache JServ 1.1-DEV) I am familiar with the "pretty
complicated" parts of it.  Basically, you can no longer count on certain things being static for the
life of your server, and this has lots of ramifications.  But exit/restart is still the lazy way out of
dealing with the issue.

>
> Cheers,
>
> Ben.
>

Craig


>
> --
> http://www.apache-ssl.org/ben.html
>
> "My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
> who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
> first group; there was less competition there."
>      - Indira Gandhi
>
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