Graceful shutdown in 2.0

[Bill Stoddard]

Has anyone ever thought about the best way to implement graceful shutdown (perhaps with a timeout) in the server? This would be a useful function to have where there is a cluster of http servers (in a DMZ for instance) proxying requests to a farm backend application servers. If you need to take an http server completely offline, you could issue something like apachectl shutdown_graceful [timeout] and prevent that server from accepting any new connections but allow the existing requests to be completed w/o disruption (subject to a timeout).

Bill