On a remote host I have an Apache web server running, and I noticed it has been restarted this morning, as the error log shows :
[Sun Feb 16 07:56:26 2014] [notice] Graceful restart requested, doing restart
I don't think it has been provoked by a human regarding the time of restart, so I am wondering :
- What is a "graceful restart request", and what triggers it ?
- Is it really needed or is it a better idea to disable it (if I find the culprit) ?
It may be a log-related issue, as the most recent error log files terminates with that line…
Best Answer
This is likely due to log rotation that is scheduled to run regularly. In Debian and derived distributions, you can look at /etc/logrotate.d for the log rotation scripts for Apache.
Log rotation is a good practice, this way the log files won't fill up your hard disks.