Sometimes, Apache decides not to shut down nicely. killall apache2 or kill -9 (apache2 PID here) shuts it down so that it can actually start back up without the port being in use. Other posts seem to indicate that PHP 5.2 might have issues hanging up Apache. I'm using the worker MPM on an x86_64 Gentoo Linux system if that helps.
Any other things I should consider hanging up Apache besides PHP? Should I be stopping Apache with /etc/init.d/apache2 gracefulstop instead of /etc/init.d/apache2 stop?