Can't start mysql - mysql respawning too fast, stopped

I finally figured out the issue. Basically, the definition of some parameters has been removed from the previous version of mysql and has been replaced with different names. To fix, in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, replace:

# Tom Added to ensure the server character set is set to utf8
default-character-set = utf8
default-collation     = utf8_general_ci

with:

# Tom Added to ensure the server character set is set to utf8
character_set_server  = utf8
collation_server      = utf8_general_ci

This is the associated launchpad bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mysql-5.5/+bug/958120.

Or easily run:

# Miraz added dpkg-reconfigure
dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.5

But make sure there's no old mysql version installation installed, if there was please remove:

# Miraz quick mysql package check
dpkg -l *mysql*

Innodb has a default setting (innodb_buffer_pool_size) which is set to 128M - this may be too large for your server (especially if you're using a small Amazon EC2 AMI - which I was) The fix that worked for me was to add the following line to /etc/mysql/my.cnf

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 16M

I wrote about this fix over here http://www.mlynn.org/2012/07/mysql-5-5-on-ubuntu-12-04-job-failed-to-start

I had a similar problem. It was frustrating because I couldn't see any error logs indicating what the problem was.

In my case, the value I had set for innodb_buffer_pool_size was too large for the memory of the server.

I found this out by running mysqld directly as the mysql user.

# su mysql
# mysqld

This way you actually see the error output.

I also had a similar problem. The items below say they have been removed from mysql server 5.5.
If you have them in your my.cnf, it won't start. Comment them out with #.
(Info derived from : http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/replication-options-slave.html)

The options affected are shown in this list:

 --master-host
 --master-user
 --master-password
 --master-port
 --master-connect-retry
 --master-ssl
 --master-ssl-ca
 --master-ssl-capath
 --master-ssl-cert
 --master-ssl-cipher
 --master-ssl-key

It seems to boil down to errors in the MySQL configuration, located in /etc/mysql/my.cnf and files in /etc/mysql/conf.d/.

In my case it was a wrong bind-address value, because the IP address of my machine had changed and MySQL couldn't bind anymore. Feel free to rea more on this in this blog article.

A good way to debug the failures in the post-start process (/etc/init/mysql.conf) is to check the upstart logs:

sudo tail -f /var/log/upstart/mysql.log 

That gave me a socket error:

error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket

In my case it was caused by a missing user setting under the [mysqld] group in my.cnf

I had the same issues, for me the bind-address was set improperly in my /etc/mysql/my.cnf file. So it seems anything that isn't right in the my.cnf can cause this issue. I haven't found anything in the logs that indicated this as the issue.

After an automatic update to mysqld-5.5.53 ubuntu 14.04.1, mysql would not start. These lines showed up in my syslog:

Oct 27 06:05:51 hostname kernel: [  593.168925] init: mysql post-start process (4997) terminated with status 1
Oct 27 06:05:51 hostname kernel: [  593.178241] type=1400 audit(1477562751.231:31): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" profile="unconfined" name
Oct 27 06:05:51 hostname kernel: [  593.204392] init: mysql main process (5032) terminated with status 1
Oct 27 06:05:51 hostname kernel: [  593.204404] init: mysql respawning too fast, stopped

The problem was solved by creating this directory:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql-files
sudo chmod 700 /var/lib/mysql-files
sudo chown mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql-files
sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

Check the /tmp permissions. I had this problem, after many time googleing and restarts, i found out that /tmp permissions was 755.

I change it to 777 and mysql start well.

My problem was 0% of free space! Double check :-)