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