If you have APC (which you should), you can turn off apc.stat to make PHP ignore changes to actual files and keep serving scripts from the (now stale) opcode ca

If you have APC (which you should), you can turn off apc.stat to make PHP ignore changes to actual files and keep serving scripts from the (now stale) opcode cache. Depending on the structure of your app, this might be good enough to keep things running smoothly during the second or two that it takes for git to update the working tree. When you're done, atomically clear the opcode cache. Turning off apc.stat also helps your pages load faster.