This document summarizes troubleshooting an error of "Too many open files" when running MySQL. The solution involved increasing the open_files_limit parameter, but it was not taking effect. Through debugging with gdb and tracing the code, it was found that mysqld was capping the open files limit to 1024 despite configuration changes. The root cause was that mysqld_safe was not passing the increased open files limit to the ulimit command due to a missing check.