I'm trying to understand the difference between service restart [someservice] and service reload [someservice]. I understand that restart restarts the service whereas reload reloads the configuration. But I don't understand the practical implications of this well enough to determine which I should use in a given context.
An example: most guides I've read for setting up PostgreSQL say that, once I've edited postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf to allow remote connections, I should run:
sudo service postgresql restart
However, if I were to guess which to use based on the description above, I would choose reload.
In case it matters, I'm on Ubuntu 11.10, though I'm hoping for an as generally applicable explanation as possible.
Best Answer
What you said is correct,
reloadtells the service to reload its configuration files. That means it should be sufficient to reload the configuration; however there may be certain services that "don't follow the rule" or that won't reload config files. Due to this you're probably safer withrestart. I personally do not usepostgresql, so I don't know.