How can you gracefully restart Apache without disconnecting SSL connections?

We are trying to reload Apache gracefully using a command such as:

apache2ctl -k graceful

This works as expected for HTTP users and the Apache config is reloaded without affecting users of the website.

However, we have found that users accessing the server via HTTPS are disconnected during a graceful reload.

How can Apache be gracefully reloaded without affecting SSL connections?

In case it helps, we are using HTTP 2 on Apache 2.4.20.

Solution 1:

To ensure that H2-based HTTP sessions are left alone (and not terminated) when executing apachectl -k graceful, upgrade your Apache software to 2.4.24 and your mod_h2 package to 1.4.7.