Restarting fastcgidispatch without losing current sessions

Describes a method to stop the fastcgidispatch process that leaves the sessions alive and untouched.

If fastcgidispatch fails to respond, you can use the kill command to stop its process. This allows for the potential of restoring the current sessions on restart; provided the service is restarted within a time span of about 1 minute:

kill -9 pid

In the example command, the "pid" is the process id of the running dispatcher. The command stops the process yet the sessions remain alive and untouched. When the dispatcher is restarted, the sessions continue to be active.

Tip:

The fastcgidispatcher can be managed via the Linux® service commands, such as service fastcgidispatch restart, etc.

Once the web server restarts the dispatcher, the dispatcher uses the session table to reconnect to the various proxies. The applications are still maintained by proxies, are still running, and once the dispatcher is relaunched, the user can continue his or her work.

CTRL+C or sending SIGTERM

In contrast to using the kill -9 pid method, the effect of pressing CTRL+C or sending SIGTERM is to stop the standalone dispatcher, and in both cases the dispatcher will request all proxies to stop. The FastCGI dispatcher will stop sessions on pressing CTRL+C as well if started in standalone mode - but not on SIGTERM.