Eric Bergen

Previously I wrote about how late the mysql pid file is created in the startup process. At first glance it seemed like a relatively easy thing to fix. In main() there is a call to start_signal_handler(). The first instance of static void start_signal_handler() does only one thing. It checks !opt_bootstrap to make sure mysqld isn’t being called by mysql_install_db. I’m not sure why mysql_install_db can’t have a pid file created but that’s getting outside the scope of my investigation. It seems simple enough to move the call to start_signal_handler() above the call to init_server_components() in main() and have the pidfile created earlier. It turns out pidfile creation happens differently on different arches.

For windows and netware start_signal_handler simply creates the pid file. For __EMX__ (I’m not sure what that is) start signal handler does nothing. By default start_signal_handler starts a signal handler thread. This thread then creates the pid file. I think this can be cleaned up by removing the start_signal_handler functions that either do nothing or only create a pid file and handle the pid file creation for arches that need it directly in main with some good self documenting ifdefs right around it.

I don’t have all the environments to test that this patch really works. I’ve tested it on linux and it does create a pid file and deletes it on shutdown. The pid file is created just after argument parsing and before the heavy weight storage engine initialization.

[Update 2009-12-07: I think the old patch broke embedded. I updated it to ifdef out the call to start_signal_handler]
Here is the patch Create pid file sooner patch.