Squid 3 reloading makes it stop serving requests

Solution 1:

This page seems to suggest that this is known a feature they are working on.

Squid currently performs reconfigure by way of a simulated shutdown, re-loading the config files, and restarting.

This causes many issues which are visible:

• ports fully closed for a duration
• memory leaks for SSL contexts, and other in-use objects
• loss of information on in-transit requests
• INVALID URL errors when protocol info disappears.
• request denials when ACLs being checked disappear.

A thread from the maillist archive suggests that if you decrease the number of helpers (auth and other) it will reload faster.