error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)' — Missing /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Question

My problem started off with me not being able to log in as root any more on my mysql install. I was attempting to run mysql without passwords turned on... but whenever I

Answer 1

If you have a lot of databases and tables on your system, and if you have innodb_file_per_table set in my.cnf, then your mysql server might have run out of opened objects / files (or rather the descriptors for these objects) Set a new max number with

open-files-limit = 2048

and restart mysql. This approach might help when the socket is not created at all, but really this might not not be the real problem, there is an underlying problem.