Thanks Reinis! That's some really great info and from the short tests that I've run so far I think this is going to be the solution.
I used this command as the test: pid="$(cat /run/nginx.pid)"; kill -USR2 $pid; sleep 10; kill -QUIT $pid And here is what happened with the reload: 37.0 MiB + 1.4 GiB = 1.4 GiB nginx (3) 495.4 MiB + 1.4 GiB = 1.9 GiB nginx (4) 606.6 MiB + 1.4 GiB = 2.0 GiB nginx (4) 738.3 MiB + 1.4 GiB = 2.1 GiB nginx (4) 40.1 MiB + 1.7 GiB = 1.8 GiB nginx (4) 57.1 MiB + 2.8 GiB = 2.8 GiB nginx (6) 57.4 MiB + 2.8 GiB = 2.8 GiB nginx (6) 1.3 GiB + 1.4 GiB = 2.7 GiB nginx (5) 14.6 MiB + 1.4 GiB = 1.4 GiB nginx (4) Started at 1.4G and ended at 1.4G. Yay! I also tested whether it was reloading gracefully (i.e. not killing active connections ) and indeed it is. Yay again! I'm going to run some more tests tomorrow and modify the systemd script on one of our servers as another test. Posted at Nginx Forum: https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,283216,283232#msg-283232 _______________________________________________ nginx mailing list nginx@nginx.org http://mailman.nginx.org/mailman/listinfo/nginx