A Whole Bunch of MySQL Stuff

Had a major event today on our server.  MySQL took the server down.  It was the daemon mysqld.  It started to spike the memory, which started the system to page furiously and then we had a kernel dump.  Went to /var/log/messages and grepped for “memory” and saw that UID27 reported out of memory as part of the crash output.  The message was

 [ERROR] /usr/share/mysqld: Out of memory (Needed xxx bytes)

So what to do?  Obviously we didn't have enough RAM allocation.  I use entirely an innodb engine with mysql.  So I had to find where mysql was getting its configs from.

From the server console, I typed in:

mysql --help

and among all of the stuff that was returned, it told me where to look for the config file.  It said:


Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf

So I went to /etc/my.cnf and used the vi editor.  I added

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 1000M

I added it under [mysqld].  We have 4 Gigs of RAM and the allowable value is up to 80% of the RAM.  Previous to this it was 16M.

Then I stopped the database by issuing the following command:

/etc/init.d/mysqld stop

No issues.

To start it, I issued

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

and it failed.  This is what it said:


[root@ap1 etc]# /etc/init.d/mysqld start
Timeout error occurred trying to start MySQL Daemon.
Starting MySQL:                                            [FAILED]

Well, went back to /etc/my.cnf and I noticed that I had forgotten the "i" in the innodb_buffer_pool_size.  I added that, and it started.

I gotta tell you, the application now screams!!  I should have done a RAM allocation earlier.