How to: Enable Graceful Restarts in Plesk

Enabling graceful restarts in Plesk 12 will reduce the apache service downtime for your clients. By default, graceful restarts are not enabled.

Let’s log into the psa database

mysql -u admin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` psa

Verify if “graceful restarts” is already enabled

select * FROM misc WHERE param = "restart_apache_gracefully";

If no values are returned then let’s go ahead and make it so

INSERT INTO misc VALUES ('restart_apache_gracefully', 'true');

Now let’s reconfigure all the apache domain configurations, it can take a couple of minutes.

/usr/local/psa/admin/bin/httpdmng --reconfigure-all

You will now find your apache service outage time is drastically reduced.