Snort now supports reloading a configuration in lieu of restarting Snort in so as to provide seamless traffic inspection during a configuration change. A separate thread will parse and create a swappable configuration object while the main Snort packet processing thread continues inspecting traffic under the current configuration. When a swappable configuration object is ready for use, the main Snort packet processing thread will swap in the new configuration to use and will continue processing under the new configuration. Note that for some preprocessors, existing session data will continue to use the configuration under which they were created in order to continue with proper state for that session. All newly created sessions will, however, use the new configuration.