Can I start/stop/restart Apache when using compressed log files ?
Yes. The compression formats we use support concatenation, meaning that data can be appended to an already existing compressed file. So, there is no restriction on Apache stop/start/restart operations when compression is on. Actually, when managelogs is stopped or restarted, the compression engine flushes the current block of compressed data from memory to disk. Then, it writes a trailer block (essentially a checksum and a signature) of about 18 bytes to the file. So, one can estimate that restarting Apache causes about 18 bytes to be added to the compressed log file, which is quite negligible if you don’t do it every 10 seconds…
