It's a useful feature that for some type of config (file based or URL based) to have the system automatically reload the content/last modified date changed.
For file the last modified date should be enough and for URL based an eTag or if-modified-since header should do the trick.
When setting up such config, the API should accept a time reference for how frequently it should check for a reload? 30 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes, once a day etc...