The Shibboleth V1 software has reached its End of Life and is no longer supported. This documentation is available for historical purposes only.

CPPSPProductionConfiguration

When to Restart the SP

When to Restart the Webserver

Configuration Change

Restart Required

 

AAP xml files

No, but existing sessions may be accessing stale data, that is, the values of some HTTP headers may be incorrect

shibboleth.xml

It's not a yes/no answer. The file is reloaded on the fly, but some of the file is only read at initial start up. Basically stuff that loads extensions or configures the Caches, Listener mechanism, and other global issues are startup only. Most of the mapping, settings, application config, endpoints, etc. are all dynamic.
Note that Apache is more complex because it has children that come and go. A child loads whatever is there at that time into its process, so you can corrupt your system until restart if you modify a setting that breaks the connection between Apache and shibd without restarting shibd.

metadata files

No

When to Restart shibd

When you change something that affects the global environment or the listener socket config. Making wholesale application changes is also a bad thing to do without restarting because sessions can be orphaned if you delete application blocks.