[cavedude]

Items are stored in shared memory (libEMuShareMem.so handles this) which means they are loaded once on startup into memory and never touched again. This has the benefit of a great increase in speed as the data is all right there, no need to query for it. Faction, loot, and spells are also in shared memory. At the present, there is no way to alter any of that data and have it take effect without rebooting the server's binaries.

You're running Linux, so you need to run cleanipc to clear your shared memory which should be added to your stop script. Search the forums for info on both.