Bug#486629: apache2 refusing to restart

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

On Tuesday 17 June 2008, Paul wrote:
> Some times I have noticed the system is abit sluggish when I
> restart apache,  the main problem is with apache, it creates lots
> of child processes that refuse to die, the biggest problem is it
> then locks up the ports it is using and the only way to kill apache
> properly at the moment is to restart the whole system.

The init script uses graceful-stop, i.e. the currently active requests 
will be finished before the apache processes are shut down. But this 
should not cause the listening sockets to be unavailable. If you use 
mod_php and your php scripts are executing other programs, you are 
likely seeing this bug:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=366124

You can use lsof or "netstat -tlnp" (as root) to determine which 
processes keep the listening sockets open. Does this fit your 
problem?

Stefan