MySQL Deadlock – Resolving Concurrent Connections in Amazon RDS

When you create an RDS instance, you pick an instance size, a database size, and optionally determine if you need specific IOPS.

I would start by looking at the RDS monitors, and see if there are any parameters that are hitting limits. You may need to increase the instance size or IOPS to increase performance.

Here is a Stored Procedure to kill long running SELECTs

DELIMITER $$

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `test`.`Kill_Long_Running_Selects` $$
CREATE PROCEDURE `test`.`Kill_Long_Running_Selects` (time_limit INT,display INT)
BEGIN

    DECLARE ndx,lastndx INT;

    DROP TABLE IF EXISTS test.LongRunningSelects;
    CREATE TABLE test.LongRunningSelects
    (
        id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
        idtokill BIGINT,
        PRIMARY KEY (id)
    ) ENGINE=MEMORY;
    INSERT INTO test.LongRunningSelects (idtokill)
    SELECT id FROM information_schema.processlist
    WHERE user<>'system user' AND info regexp '^SELECT' AND time > time_limit;

    SELECT COUNT(1) INTO lastndx FROM test.LongRunningSelects;
    SET ndx = 0;
    WHILE ndx < lastndx DO
        SET ndx = ndx + 1;
        SELECT idtokill INTO @kill_id
        FROM test.LongRunningSelects WHERE id = ndx;
        CALL mysql.rds_kill(@kill_id);
    END WHILE;

    IF lastndx > 0 THEN
        IF display = 1 THEN
            SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(idtokill) INTO @idlist FROM test.LongRunningSelects;
            SELECT @idlist IDs_KIlled;
            SELECT CONCAT('Processes Killed : ',lastndx) Kill_Long_Running_Selects;
        END IF;
    END IF;

END $$

To kill SELECTs running longer than 30 seconds, you run this

CALL test.Kill_Long_Running_Selects(30,0);

If you want to see the connections being killed, you run this

CALL test.Kill_Long_Running_Selects(30,1);

Perhaps you can create a MySQL Event to call this Stored Procedure every minute.

If Amazon does not let you have the EVENT privilege, you will have to write an external shell script on the EC2 server to connect to the DB and run the Stored Procedure. That shell script can be put into a crontab.

If Amazon does not let you have the PROCESS and SUPER privileges, you may need to move the DB out of RDS and into another EC2 instance running MySQL to accomplish this. You could then create the MySQL Event without Amazon's hosting restrictions.