xinetd needs to be run from the rc scripts with the -reuse flag. Without 
this flag heavily used services may not come back after a soft reload or 
even a hard restart. xinetd's default behavior is to not rebind to ports 
that are in use, this is different that inetd's default behavior and 
should be changed to prevent nasty surprises.

I list this as a severe bug because when it happens NOTHING is logged as 
to why the services are not restarted and it is a very difficult thing to 
troubleshoot without any kind of verbose logging. I have been running 
xinetd for over a year with this flag and have had no adverse side effects 
on my servers.

Just run 

xinetd -reuse

from the rc script instead of just xinetd.