I am planning to write a script that will execute to check if mysql is UP and running, and try to restart it automatically if it is down, and will be putting this script to cron and run it every n minutes.

But, I was wondering how I should be checking mysql status? Should I make send some dummy query, or check the processes via ps -ef, etc? What is the easiest and fastest (hence least costly) way of doing this?

Thanks.