Logrotate and missing log entries

I recently noticed that every time logrotate rotated the logs on one of my servers, the apache process on that machine seemed to just stop logging to the log files.

The problem seems to have been caused because I'd accidentally deleted the line

delaycompress

from the logrotate conf file /etc/logrotate.d/httpd. This meant that logrotate was compressing the log file while apache was sometimes still writing to it, with the result that apache failed to switch to writing to a new clean logfile.

The man page says:

delaycompress

Postpone compression of the previous log file to the next rota-
tion cycle. This has only effect when used in combination with
compress. It can be used when some program can not be told to
close its logfile and thus might continue writing to the previ-
ous log file for some time.