We have a persistent connection to Nginx on which we are issuing https requests. Now when we do a reload, the persistent connections (the requests which are already accepted) are failing as soon as the reload was issued. Those connections are being dropped. Is this the expected behavior?

In the Nginx documentation, it was mentioned that the older worker process would continue to run untile they have served the accepted inflight requests and then would go down. But the actual behavior seems to be different as the persistent connections are being dropped as soon as a configuration reload was issued.

To add to the above question, while reload was in progress, i am trying to establish a new connection and its not being established. Can't the new worker processes which were spawned as a result of configuration reload, straight away serve the incoming new connections?