I'm trying to understand the difference between service restart [someservice]
and service reload [someservice]
. I understand that "restart" restarts the service whereas "reload" reloads the configuration, but I don't understand the practical implications of this well enough to determine which I should use in a given context.
An example: most guides I've read for setting up PostgreSQL say that, once I've edited postgresql.conf and pg_hba.conf to allow remote connections, I should issue sudo service postgresql restart
. However, if I were guessing which to use based on the description above I would choose "reload".
In case it matters, I'm on Ubuntu 11.10 - though I'm hoping for as generally applicable an explanation as possible.