Ubuntu – Apache2 on Ubuntu: I don’t have installed apachectl

I've had the same problem with an earlier version of Ubuntu (12.04), Apache 2.2.22 and php5-fpm fastCGI flavour of PHP. Doing

service apache2 restart 

isn't enough, because it just restarts the http server: you have to issue also the command

service php5-fpm restart

to have the application server restarted and PHP read the php.ini file again.

It depends on the scale you're at -- you've got the basic steps down, the main differences would be in how the config file is propagated to the production servers (bigger sites would involve things like checking it into revision control and waiting for or forcing Puppet, Chef, CfEngine, etc. to propagate the change out) and the degree of automation that is used (again, bigger sites hopefully have more automated procedures, since they'll be dealing with more than one server).

AS for graceful versus hard restart -- in the graceful, the "main" Apache parent process doesn't exit, just the worker child processes. I've seen circumstances where the primary process had some sort of cached state -- old DNS, whatever -- that didn't get flushed with a graceful, only a full stop/start cycle.