restarting services (apache in particular) from weekly periodic script

[Vivek Khera]

Once a week I restart my mod_perl enabled apache, to keep it from 
growing out of bounds.  There is a memory leak in the DSO mod_perl 
which I haven't yet tracked down which occurs when you do a graceful 
restart of apache.

However, when my /etc/weekly.local script runs 
"/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh restart" the apache process never seems 
to die.  The rc script is stuck in the "waiting for pid NNNN" loop.  If 
I log in later and run "/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh stop" the script 
from weekly.local finally completes (and starts the new apache 
instance) since the old apache process dies.  The email message of the 
weekly output shows the PID number a bazillion times from the loop.

Is there something preventing weekly.local from properly stopping 
apache?  I haven't tried it with any other daemons.

FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE
apache+mod_ssl-1.3.31+2.8.18_4