> 1.) Because it is a graceful reload it won't happen before the HTTP daemon
>     has handled all existing connection. You can verify this by using
>     "apachectl graceful" and wait a few minutes.

thanks for digging into this, matthias.

although my machine also is (almost) idle, it took six minutes. i never 
ran into this before (and i do a lot of web serving, for many years now, 
on different OSs). weird.

thanks,

timo