Subtle differences of restart

Hello all:

I had a few subtle question on NGINX operation and in particular are of
reseading configuration :

– Assuming NGINX processes are running and the configuration is
syntacaly
valid, what it the difference when ‘…/nginx -s reload’ is executed
versus
‘kill -HUP ’ is executed? Is ther any difference
in
the end result and if so what are they?

– Assuming NGINX processes are NOT running and the configuration is
syntacaly valid, what will ‘…/nginx -s reload’ will do?

– Assuming NGINX processes are running and the configuration is
syntacaly
valid, what should be used to reread the configuraton from a cron job?

Thanks so answers…

Posted at Nginx Forum:

Hello!

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 04:54:55PM -0400, [email protected]
wrote:

Hello all:

I had a few subtle question on NGINX operation and in particular are of
reseading configuration :

– Assuming NGINX processes are running and the configuration is syntacaly
valid, what it the difference when ‘…/nginx -s reload’ is executed versus
‘kill -HUP ’ is executed? Is ther any difference in
the end result and if so what are they?

The “nginx -s reload” requires (otherwise unneeded) parsing of the
configuration file. Otherwise it’s just a tricky way to do “kill -HUP
…”.
It was introduced mostly for win32 where there is no kill.

– Assuming NGINX processes are NOT running and the configuration is
syntacaly valid, what will ‘…/nginx -s reload’ will do?

It will fail as it won’t be able to open pid file.

– Assuming NGINX processes are running and the configuration is syntacaly
valid, what should be used to reread the configuraton from a cron job?

I would recommend using kill.

(Well, actually I wouldn’t recommend reloading configuration by
cron, at least without some precautions to prevent situation when
there are too many worker processes shutting down. But I assume
you understand what you are doing.)


Maxim D.
http://nginx.org/en/donation.html