Why and when to restart your web server (PHP)

Configuration changes in newrelic.ini or newrelic.cfg files do not take effect (for example, naming your app, generating logs, changing your license key) until you restart the web server.

If your package manager automatically updates the agent, you must restart your web server. Updating the agent without restarting can cause the agent to stop reporting.

This issue occurs when auto-update is enabled and the daemon updates to a new version. The new daemon is then unable to communicate with the agent, which is still running the old version.

To avoid this, the new agent must be started after the update. This process is complicated, because a full agent restart also requires you to restart your web server software.

If you have the agent in external startup mode, you must manually start the daemon and restart the agent for the agent to report.

Using the apachectl restart command does not always fully restart the web server, so it doesn't re-parse the agent's configuration files. New Relic recommends using:

apachectl stop
apachectl start