<h2><aname="race"id="race">Appendix: signals and race conditions</a></h2>
<p>Prior to Apache 1.2b9 there were several <em>race
conditions</em> involving the restart and die signals (a simply put,
a race condition is a time-sensitive problem - if something happens
at just the wrong time or things happen in the wrong order,
undesired behaviour will result. If the same thing happens at the right
time, all will be well). For those architectures that have the "right"
feature set we have eliminated as many as we can. But it should
be noted that race conditions do still exist on certain
architectures.</p>
<p>Architectures that use an on-disk <codeclass="directive"><ahref="./mod/mpm_common.html#scoreboardfile">ScoreBoardFile</a></code> can potentially have
their scoreboards corrupted. This can result in the "bind:
Address already in use" (after <code>HUP</code>) or "long lost
child came home!" (after <code>USR1</code>). The former is a fatal
error, while the latter just causes the server to lose a
scoreboard slot. So it may be advisable to use graceful
restarts, with an occasional hard restart. These problems are very
difficult to work around, but fortunately most architectures do
not require a scoreboard file. See the <codeclass="directive"><ahref="./mod/mpm_common.html#scoreboardfile">ScoreBoardFile</a></code> documentation for
architecture which uses it.</p>
<p>All architectures have a small race condition in each child
involving the second and subsequent requests on a persistent
HTTP connection (KeepAlive). It may exit after reading the
request line but before reading any of the request headers.
There is a fix that was discovered too late to make 1.2. In
theory this isn't an issue because the KeepAlive client has to
expect these events because of network latencies and server
timeouts. In practice it doesn't seem to affect anything either
-- in a test case the server was restarted twenty times per
second and clients successfully browsed the site without