MySQL – Waiting for Table Level Lock in phpMyAdmin

lockingMySQLphpmyadmin

I have a problem with my website.. The last few days, at random times the website has become very slow. I started to investigate the best I could. I saw that the MySQL process was using 85 – 95% of the available memory of my server. (Should I upgrade my memory also?)

I checked my MySQL process log, and I noticed a huge list of queries with: Waiting for table level lock

But what I also noticed, what that ALL of these queries with "table level lock", was only queries which had something to do with my table called "users".

I have 20 other tables, with constant queries, but I don't see them on the list.. So I guess the problem is with the users table?

I want to know how I can improve the table, and eventually remove the table level lock?

I also ran this:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'query_cache%';

Which resulted in this:

query_cache_limit
1048576
query_cache_min_res_unit
4096
query_cache_size
33554432
query_cache_type
ON
query_cache_wlock_invalidate
OFF

Please let me know what I can do to improve my database/mysql.

Best Answer

Perhaps the users table is type/storage engine MyISAM and the others are InnoDB or perhaps the other tables aren't subject to many INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE queries (IIRC, locking isn't used for SELECT).

Related Solutions

Mysql – way to prevent queries from waiting for table level lock

The MyISAM Storage Engine is furiously notorious for performing full table locks for any DML (INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs). InnoDB would definitely solve that issue in the long term.

I wrote about pros and cons of using MyISAM vs InnoDB

InnoDB vs MyISAM with many indexes (Jul 05, 2012)
Which is faster, InnoDB or MyISAM? (May 03, 2012)
Any gotchas at all with converting from MyISAM to InnoDB? (Jan 09, 2012)
Should I use a storage engine other than MyISAM to optimise these tables or should I get better disks? (Oct 07, 2011)
Benefits of table level locking (Sep 14, 2011)
What are the main differences between InnoDB and MyISAM? (Apr 14, 2011)

With regard to your current question, here is a possible scenario:

article and article_comments are both MyISAM tables
article_comments has one or more indexes with status as a column
Index page updates for article_comments are cached in the MyISAM Key Buffer (sized by key_buffer_size), causing old index pages out of the MyISAM Key Buffer
You have SELECT queries that perform JOINs between article and article_comments

In my suggested scenario, SELECTs against the article table can be held up from allowing writes because of having to wait for article_comments to be free from any DML (in this case, an UPDATE)

MySQL Performance – Is Frequent Query Cache Invalidation Worth It?

You should just disable the query cache with

[mysqld]
query_cache_size = 0

and then restart mysql. Why would I suggest that ???

The Query Cache will always butt heads with InnoDB. It would be nice if InnoDB's MVCC would let queries be served from the query cache if modifications do not affect repeatable reads for other transactions. Unfortunately, InnoDB just does not do that. Apparently, you have a lot of queries that get invalidated rather quickly and are probably not being reused.

For InnoDB under MySQL 4.0, the query cache was disabled for transactions. For MySQL 4.1+, InnoDB plays traffic cop when allowing access to the query cache on a per-table basis.

From the perspective of your question, I would say that the justification of removing the query cache is not so much the overhead, but how InnoDB manages it.

For more information on how InnoDB interacts with the query cache, please read pages 213-215 of the book "High Performance MySQL (Second Edition)".

If all or the majority of your data is MyISAM, you could go with your original idea of using SQL_NO_CACHE.

If you have a mix of InnoDB and MyISAM, you will have to find the right balance for your application based on on how high your cache misses are. In fact, pages 209-210 of the same book point out reasons for cache misses :

The query is not cacheable, either because it contains a nondeterministic construct (such as CURRENT_DATE) or because its result set is too large to store.Both types of uncacheable queries increment the Qcache_not_cached status variable.

The server has never seen the query before, so it never had the chance to cache its result.

The query's result was previously cached, but the server removed it. This can happen because there wasn't enough memory to keep it, because someone instructed the server to remove it, or because it was invalidated

and the root causes of high cache misses with few uncacheable queries may be :

The query cache is not warm yet. That is the server hasn't had a chance to fill the cache with result sets.

The server is seeing queries it hasn't seen before. If you do not have a lot of repeated queries, this can happen even after the cache is warmed up.

There are a lot of cache invalidations.

UPDATE 2012-09-06 10:10 EDT

Looking your latest updated info, you have query_cache_limit set to 1048576 (1M). This limits any result set to 1M. If you retrieve anything bigger, it will simply not be cached. While you have have query_cache_size set to 104857600 (100M), this only allows for 100 cached results set in a perfect world. If you perform hundreds of queries, fragmentation will come about rather quickly. You also have 4096 (4K) as the minimum size result set. Unfortunately, mysql has no internal mechanism for defragmenting the query cache.

If you must have the query cache and you have so much RAM, you could execute the following:

SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 0;
SELECT SLEEP(60);
SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 1024 * 1024 * 1024;

in order to purge the query cache. You lose all cached results, so run these lines during off-peak hours.

I would also assign the following:

query_cache_size = 1G
query_cache_limit = 8M

That leaves 23G of RAM. I would raise the following:

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 12G
key_buffer_size = 4G

That leaves 7G. This should be adequate for OS and DB Connections.

Keep in mind that the key buffer caches only MyISAM index pages, while the InnoDB Buffer Pool caches data and indexes.

One more recommendation: upgrade to MySQL 5.5 so you can configure InnoDB for multiple CPU and multiple threads for read/write I/O.

See my earlier posts on using MySQL 5.5 in conjunction with accessing multiple CPUs for InnoDB

Nov 24, 2011 : Why mysql 5.5 slower than 5.1 (linux,using mysqlslap)
Oct 05, 2011 : Query runs a long time in some newer MySQL versions
Sep 20, 2011 : Multi cores and MySQL Performance
Jun 19, 2011 : How do I properly perform a MySQL bake-off?

UPDATE 2012-09-06 14:56 EDT

My method for clearing the query cache is rather extreme because it hoses cached data and forms a completely different segment of RAM. As you did point out in your comment, FLUSH QUERY CACHE (as you suggested) or even RESET QUERY CACHE would be better. For clarification, when I said "no internal mechanism," I meant exactly that. Defragmentation is needed and has to be done manually. It would need to be crontab'd.

If you do DML (INSERTs, UPDATEs, DELETEs) on InnoDB more often than on MyISAM, I would say remove the query cache altogether, which I said in the beginning.