Many configs have thread_stack_size configured explicitly, but that can cause rather bad trouble:

• if the stack inside a thread it’s too small, you can get segfault crashes (stack overflow, essentially). Particularly on 64-bit.
• if the stack is too large, your system cannot handle as many connections since it all eats RAM.

Let mysqld sort it out, on startup it does a calculation based on the CPU architecture, and that’s actually the most sensible. So for almost all setups, remove any thread_stack_size=… line you might have in my.cnf.

Do you know if your production MySQL servers will come back up when restarted? A recent support episode illustrates a number of best practices. The task looked trivial: Update a production MySQL server (replication master) with a configuration tuned and tested on a development server. Clean shutdown, change configuration, restart. Unfortunately, the MySQL daemon did not just ‘come back’, leaving 2 sites offline. Thus begins an illuminating debugging story. First place to look is the daemon error log, which revealed that the server was segfaulting, seemingly at the end of or just after InnoDB recovery. Reverting to the previous configuration did not help, nor did changing the InnoDB recovery mode. Working with the client, we performed a failover to a replication slave, while I got a second opinion from a fellow engineer to work out what had gone wrong on the server. Since debug symbols weren’t shown in the stack trace, we needed …