easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like
Other things that come to mind are database migrations, running tests before deployment, pushing code to multiple servers etc.
It is probably a good idea to automate all these tasks.
Yes, with an application server you might have to reload the code, but it doesn't really matter, because thats just one step of your automated deployment.
And if you use an opcode cache you probably have to restart the server with PHP anyway.
easy rollbacks to previous versions if a deploy went awry, separate static media serving (because it's faster), load balancing and the like
Other things that come to mind are database migrations, running tests before deployment, pushing code to multiple servers etc.
It is probably a good idea to automate all these tasks.
Yes, with an application server you might have to reload the code, but it doesn't really matter, because thats just one step of your automated deployment.
And if you use an opcode cache you probably have to restart the server with PHP anyway.