Multiple instances of Apache

Question

I'm running a VPS and have several websites being served under 1 Apache instance. Issue with this is that I'm working on a Django application which would probably require me to restart Apache. Is there any issue to running multiple instances of Apache and each one would be serving a different site? This would allow me to restart one instance without affecting the other.

Unless someone has a better idea?

Thanks!

EDIT Would it be better to run more lightweight webservers to handle simple HTML sites rather than Apache?

Answer 1

As long as you point to different logs & bind to a different IP/port, there's no problem with that at all. The obvious question, though, is why do you need to restart Apache?

Answer 2

To answer your second question: yes, nginx is adept at serving static HTML files, and in fact, there's deployments out there that use nginx as a reverse proxy in order to off load a lot of burden from the main Apache server.

Answer 3

You should try the Django work without any restarting of apache. Most sever side environments work fine while doing development work without any need for stopping and starting the web server over and over again.

But, yes you can run any number of apace instances as long as you make sure your second server's config file is pointing at different resources. Like:

• ports, as long as the port is different you can use the same IP
• log files, this is a big and non obvious one. apache does not usually log though syslog but directly opens it's log files
• might be a few other things that collide, look at every option in httpd.conf

About serving static files. Yes, you can use a lighter web server to do this. But, before you go to the effort be sure that it will do you any good. Is apache really using resources you need elsewhere? Maybe just configure apache to not start quite so many child processes. Be sure the added complication will pay for itself, because down the road it will almost assuredly confuse somebody when they try to figure out how everything is working.

Answer 4

You can flush Apache's configuration with "apachectl graceful" ("httpd -k graceful").

From Apache's documentation:

Gracefully restarts the Apache httpd daemon. If the daemon is not running, it is started. This differs from a normal restart in that currently open connections are not aborted. A side effect is that old log files will not be closed immediately. This means that if used in a log rotation script, a substantial delay may be necessary to ensure that the old log files are closed before processing them. This command automatically checks the configuration files as in configtest before initiating the restart to make sure Apache doesn't die. This is equivalent to apachectl -k graceful.