Diagnosing Startup Problems

Server startup problems usually occur when a change has been made to MySQL configuration or the server itself. MySQL reports errors when this occurs, but because most MySQL servers are started automatically as system processes or services, these messages might not be seen.

When troubleshooting system startup problems, try to manually start the server first. The MySQL server itself is started by executing mysqld on the command line. Here are several important command mysqld line options:

• --help displays help, a list of options.

• --safe-mode loads the server minus some optimizations.

• --verbose displays full text messages (use in conjunction with --help for more detailed help messages).

• --version displays version information and then quits.

Several additional command-line options (pertaining to the use of log files) are listed in the next section.