Actually the link I posted dealt with reloading config, not restarting (which is something completely different - you can't upgrade binary that way). But broken

Actually the link I posted dealt with reloading config, not restarting (which is something completely different - you can't upgrade binary that way). But broken clients are everywhere, so you can't discount them. And persisten connections too, while we are at it. I did however find instructions how to properly restart Nginx without dropping connections: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upgrade-nginx-in-place-without-dropping-client-connections https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upgr... Apparently it can be done (and could even be automated), but the procedure looks very generic to me (not nginx-specific). Is this what you did?