Thanks for your thoughtful comment.

I’m not serving any large files, in fact nothing over a few hundred kilobytes (an image or two).

I agree that graceful-stop is desirable over “stop” — but what’s more important is that apache doesn’t freak out after several restarts —

I’ll take your suggestions to mind and experiment some, and report what I find either here or in a new post.

Thanks,
Yousef

You can set the GracefulShutdownTimeout to specific how long the processes should wait until they die. By default, it is set to 0 which means they wait indefinitely. If you set it to 1, then things should shut down pretty quickly.

I also posted to the launchpad bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/apache2/+bug/174805

Personally, I prefer the use of graceful-stop as it lets the current requests finish. The sites I host don’t serve large files.

.:. brainsik