Getting "Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction" even though I'm not using a transaction

I'm running the following MySQL UPDATE statement:

mysql> update customer set account_import_id = 1;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

I'm not using a transaction, so why would I be getting this error? I even tried restarting my MySQL server and it didn't help.

The table has 406,733 rows.

HOW TO FORCE UNLOCK for locked tables in MySQL:

Breaking locks like this may cause atomicity in the database to not be enforced on the sql statements that caused the lock.

This is hackish, and the proper solution is to fix your application that caused the locks. However, when dollars are on the line, a swift kick will get things moving again.

1. Enter MySQL

   mysql -u your_user -p

2. Let's see the list of locked tables

   mysql> show open tables where in_use>0;

3. Let's see the list of the current processes, one of them is locking your table(s)

   mysql> show processlist;

4. Kill one of these processes

   mysql> kill ;

You are using a transaction; autocommit does not disable transactions, it just makes them automatically commit at the end of the statement.

What is happening is, some other thread is holding a record lock on some record (you're updating every record in the table!) for too long, and your thread is being timed out.

You can see more details of the event by issuing a

SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS

after the event (in SQL editor). Ideally do this on a quiet test-machine.

mysql> set innodb_lock_wait_timeout=100;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

mysql> show variables like 'innodb_lock_wait_timeout';
+--------------------------+-------+
| Variable_name            | Value |
+--------------------------+-------+
| innodb_lock_wait_timeout | 100   |
+--------------------------+-------+

Now trigger the lock again. You have 100 seconds time to issue a SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS\G to the database and see which other transaction is locking yours.

Take a look on if your database is fine tuned. Especially the transactions isolation. Isn't good idea to increase the innodb_lock_wait_timeout variable.

Check your database transaction isolation level in the mysql cli:

mysql> SELECT @@GLOBAL.tx_isolation, @@tx_isolation, @@session.tx_isolation;
+-----------------------+-----------------+------------------------+
| @@GLOBAL.tx_isolation | @@tx_isolation  | @@session.tx_isolation |
+-----------------------+-----------------+------------------------+
| REPEATABLE-READ       | REPEATABLE-READ | REPEATABLE-READ        |
+-----------------------+-----------------+------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

You could get improvements changing de isolation level, use the oracle like READ COMMITTED instead REPEATABLE READ (InnoDB Defaults)

mysql> SET tx_isolation = 'READ-COMMITTED';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SET GLOBAL tx_isolation = 'READ-COMMITTED';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> 

Also try use SELECT FOR UPDATE only in if necesary.

Something is blocking the execution of the query. Most likely another query updating, inserting or deleting from one of the tables in your query. You have to find out what that is:

SHOW PROCESSLIST;

Once you locate the blocking process, find its id and run :

KILL {id};

Re-run your initial query.

100% with what MarkR said. autocommit makes each statement a one statement transaction.

SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS should give you some clues as to the deadlock reason. Have a good look at your slow query log too to see what else is querying the table and try to remove anything that's doing a full tablescan. Row level locking works well but not when you're trying to lock all of the rows!

mysql->SHOW PROCESSLIST;
kill xxxx; 

and then kill which one in sleep. In my case it is 2156.

Can you update any other record within this table, or is this table heavily used? What I am thinking is that while it is attempting to acquire a lock that it needs to update this record the timeout that was set has timed out. You may be able to increase the time which may help.

The number of rows is not huge... Create an index on account_import_id if its not the primary key.

CREATE INDEX idx_customer_account_import_id ON customer (account_import_id);

If you've just killed a big query, it will take time to rollback. If you issue another query before the killed query is done rolling back, you might get a lock timeout error. That's what happened to me. The solution was just to wait a bit.

Details:

I had issued a DELETE query to remove about 900,000 out of about 1 million rows.

I ran this by mistake (removes only 10% of the rows): DELETE FROM table WHERE MOD(id,10) = 0

Instead of this (removes 90% of the rows): DELETE FROM table WHERE MOD(id,10) != 0

I wanted to remove 90% of the rows, not 10%. So I killed the process in the MySQL command line, knowing that it would roll back all the rows it had deleted so far.

Then I ran the correct command immediately, and got a lock timeout exceeded error soon after. I realized that the lock might actually be the rollback of the killed query still happening in the background. So I waited a few seconds and re-ran the query.

I came from Google and I just wanted to add the solution that worked for me. My problem was I was trying to delete records of a huge table that had a lot of FK in cascade so I got the same error as the OP.

I disabled the autocommit and then it worked just adding COMMIT at the end of the SQL sentence. As far as I understood this releases the buffer bit by bit instead of waiting at the end of the command.

To keep with the example of the OP, this should have worked:

mysql> set autocommit=0;

mysql> update customer set account_import_id = 1; commit;

Do not forget to reactivate the autocommit again if you want to leave the MySQL config as before.

mysql> set autocommit=1;

Try to update the below two parameters as they must be having default values.

> innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50

> innodb_rollback_on_timeout = ON

For checking parameter value you can use the below SQL.

> SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES LIKE 'innodb_rollback_on_timeout';

Make sure the database tables are using InnoDB storage engine and READ-COMMITTED transaction isolation level.

You can check it by SELECT @@GLOBAL.tx_isolation, @@tx_isolation; on mysql console.

If it is not set to be READ-COMMITTED then you must set it. Make sure before setting it that you have SUPER privileges in mysql.

You can take help from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/set-transaction.html.

By setting this I think your problem will be get solved.

---

You might also want to check you aren't attempting to update this in two processes at once. Users ( @tala ) have encountered similar error messages in this context, maybe double-check that...

I've faced a similar issue when doing some testing.

Reason - In my case transaction was not committed from my spring boot application because I killed the @transactional function during the execution(when the function was updating some rows). Due to which transaction was never committed to the database(MySQL).

Result - not able to update those rows from anywhere. But able to update other rows of the table.

mysql> update some_table set some_value = "Hello World" where id = 1;
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

Solution - killed all the MySQL processes using

• sudo killall -9 mysqld

• sudo killall -9 mysqld_safe (restarting the server when an error occurs and logging runtime information to an error log. Not required in my case)

Late to the party (as usual) however my issue was the fact that I wrote some bad SQL (being a novice) and several processes had a lock on the record(s) <-- not sure the appropriate verbiage. I ended up having to just: SHOW PROCESSLIST and then kill the IDs using KILL <id>

This kind of thing happened to me when I was using php language construct exit; in middle of transaction. Then this transaction "hangs" and you need to kill mysql process (described above with processlist;)

In my instance, I was running an abnormal query to fix data. If you lock the tables in your query, then you won't have to deal with the Lock timeout:

LOCK TABLES `customer` WRITE;
update customer set account_import_id = 1;
UNLOCK TABLES;

This is probably not a good idea for normal use.

For more info see: MySQL 8.0 Reference Manual

I ran into this having 2 Doctrine DBAL connections, one of those as non-transactional (for important logs), they are intended to run parallel not depending on each other.

CodeExecution(
    TransactionConnectionQuery()
    TransactionlessConnectionQuery()
)

My integration tests were wrapped into transactions for data rollback after very test.

beginTransaction()
CodeExecution(
    TransactionConnectionQuery()
    TransactionlessConnectionQuery() // CONFLICT
)
rollBack()

My solution was to disable the wrapping transaction in those tests and reset the db data in another way.

We ran into this issue yesterday and after slogging through just about every suggested solution here, and several others from other answers/forums we ended up resolving it once we realized the actual issue.

Due to some poor planning, our database was stored on a mounted volume that was also receiving our regular automated backups. That volume had reached max capacity.

Once we cleared up some space and restarted, this error was resolved.

Note that we did also manually kill several of the processes: kill <process_id>; so that may still be necessary.

Overall, our takeaway was that it was incredibly frustrating that none of our logs or warnings directly mentioned a lack of disk space, but that did seem to be the root cause.

I had similar error when using python to access mysql database.
The python program was using a while and for loop.
Closing cursor and link at appropriate line solved problem
https://github.com/nishishailesh/sensa_host_com/blob/master/sensa_write.py see line 230
It appears that asking repeated link without closing previous link produced this error

In our case the problem did not have much to do with the locks themselves.

The issue was that one of our application endpoints needed to open 2 connections in parallel to process a single request.

Example:

1. Open 1st connection
2. Start transaction 1
3. Lock 1 row in table1
4. Open 2nd connection
5. Start transaction 2
6. Lock 1 row in table2
7. Commit transaction 2
8. Release 2nd connection
9. Commit transaction 1
10. Release 1st connection

Our application had a connection pool limited to 10 connections.

Unfortunately, under load, as soon as all connections were used the application stopped working and we started having this problem. We had several requests that needed to open a second connection to complete, but could not due to the connection pool limit. As a consequence, those requests were keeping a lock on the table1 row for a long time leading the following requests that needed to lock the same row to throw this error.

Solution:

• In the short term, we patched the problem by increasing the connection pool limit.
• In the long term, we removed all nested connections, to fully solve the issue.

Tips:

You can easily check if you have nested connections by trying to lower your connection pool limit to 1 and test your application.

Had this same error, even though I was only updating one table with one entry, but after restarting mysql, it was resolved.