Mac OS X, MySQL Preference Pane doesn't work

Question

I downloaded and installed MySQL 5.1.47 for OS X 10.6 using the DMG archive:

mysql-5.1.47-osx10.6-x86_64.dmg

I also installed MySQL.prefPane and MySQLStartupItem.pkg. MySQL.prefPane is a Preference Pane. The problem is, whenever I attempt to start/stop MySQL from the Preference Pane, System Preferences just hangs. It runs at about 50% CPU forever, eventually I have for force quit System Preferences. The same thing happens if I toggle "Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup". Basically the MySQL Preference Pane is not functional.

Note that I have no problem starting MySQL from the command line:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe

I have tried reinstalling MySQL and the Preference Pane. I'm using the standard installation location, nothing out of the ordinary. Every time the MySQL Preference Pane just hangs.

I'm doing this on a Macbook Pro (Intel) running OS X 10.6.3. There are no old versions of MySQL on this machine.

Follow-up: Well it's now January 2012 so I figure I'd check to see if this has been fixed. I tried the latest MySQL 5.5.20 on OS X 10.6.8 and it's still broken - same behavior, it just hangs (had to force quit). I tried Jamie Wong's and carloandaya's suggestions, both did not work.

Answer 1

I had this problem too. It turned out that I installed the 32 bit MySQL server on my 64 bit Mac on accident. Woops! I would recommend verifying your processor type (32 or 64 bit) and reinstalling the according MySQL DMG.

It took me a couple of days to figure this out! MySQL was still running fine in the background, it's just the preference pane and connecting to it via terminal that would not work.

I hope this works for you!

Answer 2

Other solutions here didn't work for me, but I cobbled together my own solution with the help of this bug ticket: https://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=28854 (specifically the comment by BuB Javier)

The trick was twofold:

1. Create a /bin/pidof file using the code from http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Mac/unix.html

   #!/bin/sh
   ps axc|awk "{if (\$5==\"$1\") print \$1}"|tr '\n' ' '
   

   Make sure it's executable.

2. Create a /etc/my.conf or ~/.my.conf file with the pid-file option specifying the path to the PID file (e.g. /usr/local/mysql/data/`hostname`.pid). (This is easy to do within MySQLWorkbench.)
   I discovered this after trying to stop the server in MySQLWorkbench and it throwing "PID file not found!" error messages. Apparently specifying the pid-file location in the mysql.server file doesn't work.

I did change some permissions to _mysql:wheel here and there as frequently suggested, but I'm not sure that mattered in my case. After doing the two steps above, the preference pane was working again. If it doesn't work for you, try changing some file permissions.

MySQL 5.6.25 Community Server (64bit)
Mac OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)