Why httpd graceful restart takes such a long time?

Note that if you have an invalid hostname in your etc/hosts file -- for example, if you did not modify the default installation settings -- then you may wait up to 90 seconds for various tasks to be performed, including starting/restarting httpd.

vi /etc/hosts

Change

127.0.0.1   localhost localhost.localdomain localhost4 localhost4.localdomain4
::1         localhost localhost.localdomain localhost6 localhost6.localdomain6

To

127.0.0.1   localhost
::1         localhost
111.222.333.444  www.mysite.com mysite.com

References:

/etc/hosts entry for single IP server serving multiple domains

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/57439/slow-start-of-midnight-commander#answer-397879

A graceful restart waits for all current connections to close before restarting, whereas a standard restart just aborts current connections.