How to avoid MySQL 'Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction'

I have a innoDB table which records online users. It gets updated on every page refresh by a user to keep track of which pages they are on and their last access date to the site. I then have a cron that runs every 15 minutes to DELETE old records.

I got a 'Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction' for about 5 minutes last night and it appears to be when running INSERTs into this table. Can someone suggest how to avoid this error?

=== EDIT ===

Here are the queries that are running:

First Visit to site:

INSERT INTO onlineusers SET
ip = 123.456.789.123,
datetime = now(),
userid = 321,
page = '/thispage',
area = 'thisarea',
type = 3

On each page refresh:

UPDATE onlineusers SET
ips = 123.456.789.123,
datetime = now(),
userid = 321,
page = '/thispage',
area = 'thisarea',
type = 3
WHERE id = 888

Cron every 15 minutes:

DELETE FROM onlineusers WHERE datetime <= now() - INTERVAL 900 SECOND

It then does some counts to log some stats (ie: members online, visitors online).

One easy trick that can help with most deadlocks is sorting the operations in a specific order.

You get a deadlock when two transactions are trying to lock two locks at opposite orders, ie:

• connection 1: locks key(1), locks key(2);
• connection 2: locks key(2), locks key(1);

If both run at the same time, connection 1 will lock key(1), connection 2 will lock key(2) and each connection will wait for the other to release the key -> deadlock.

Now, if you changed your queries such that the connections would lock the keys at the same order, ie:

• connection 1: locks key(1), locks key(2);
• connection 2: locks key(1), locks key(2);

it will be impossible to get a deadlock.

So this is what I suggest:

1. Make sure you have no other queries that lock access more than one key at a time except for the delete statement. if you do (and I suspect you do), order their WHERE in (k1,k2,..kn) in ascending order.

2. Fix your delete statement to work in ascending order:

Change

DELETE FROM onlineusers 
WHERE datetime <= now() - INTERVAL 900 SECOND

To

DELETE FROM onlineusers 
WHERE id IN (
    SELECT id FROM onlineusers
    WHERE datetime <= now() - INTERVAL 900 SECOND 
    ORDER BY id
) u;

Another thing to keep in mind is that MySQL documentation suggest that in case of a deadlock the client should retry automatically. you can add this logic to your client code. (Say, 3 retries on this particular error before giving up).

Deadlock happen when two transactions wait on each other to acquire a lock. Example:

• Tx 1: lock A, then B
• Tx 2: lock B, then A

There are numerous questions and answers about deadlocks. Each time you insert/update/or delete a row, a lock is acquired. To avoid deadlock, you must then make sure that concurrent transactions don't update row in an order that could result in a deadlock. Generally speaking, try to acquire lock always in the same order even in different transaction (e.g. always table A first, then table B).

Another reason for deadlock in database can be missing indexes. When a row is inserted/update/delete, the database needs to check the relational constraints, that is, make sure the relations are consistent. To do so, the database needs to check the foreign keys in the related tables. It might result in other lock being acquired than the row that is modified. Be sure then to always have index on the foreign keys (and of course primary keys), otherwise it could result in a table lock instead of a row lock. If table lock happen, the lock contention is higher and the likelihood of deadlock increases.

It is likely that the delete statement will affect a large fraction of the total rows in the table. Eventually this might lead to a table lock being acquired when deleting. Holding on to a lock (in this case row- or page locks) and acquiring more locks is always a deadlock risk. However I can't explain why the insert statement leads to a lock escalation - it might have to do with page splitting/adding, but someone knowing MySQL better will have to fill in there.

For a start it can be worth trying to explicitly acquire a table lock right away for the delete statement. See LOCK TABLES and Table locking issues.

In case someone is still struggling with this issue:

I faced similar issue where 2 requests were hitting the server at the same time. There was no situation like below:

T1:
    BEGIN TRANSACTION
    INSERT TABLE A
    INSERT TABLE B
    END TRANSACTION

T2:
    BEGIN TRANSACTION
    INSERT TABLE B
    INSERT TABLE A
    END TRANSACTION

So, I was puzzled why deadlock is happening.

Then I found that there was parent child relation ship between 2 tables because of foreign key. When I was inserting a record in child table, the transaction was acquiring a lock on parent table's row. Immediately after that I was trying to update the parent row which was triggering elevation of lock to EXCLUSIVE one. As 2nd concurrent transaction was already holding a SHARED lock, it was causing deadlock.

Refer to: https://blog.tekenlight.com/2019/02/21/database-deadlock-mysql.html

You might try having that delete job operate by first inserting the key of each row to be deleted into a temp table like this pseudocode

create temporary table deletetemp (userid int);

insert into deletetemp (userid)
  select userid from onlineusers where datetime <= now - interval 900 second;

delete from onlineusers where userid in (select userid from deletetemp);

Breaking it up like this is less efficient but it avoids the need to hold a key-range lock during the delete.

Also, modify your select queries to add a where clause excluding rows older than 900 seconds. This avoids the dependency on the cron job and allows you to reschedule it to run less often.

Theory about the deadlocks: I don't have a lot of background in MySQL but here goes... The delete is going to hold a key-range lock for datetime, to prevent rows matching its where clause from being added in the middle of the transaction, and as it finds rows to delete it will attempt to acquire a lock on each page it is modifying. The insert is going to acquire a lock on the page it is inserting into, and then attempt to acquire the key lock. Normally the insert will wait patiently for that key lock to open up but this will deadlock if the delete tries to lock the same page the insert is using because thedelete needs that page lock and the insert needs that key lock. This doesn't seem right for inserts though, the delete and insert are using datetime ranges that don't overlap so maybe something else is going on.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-next-key-locking.html

For Java programmers using Spring, I've avoided this problem using an AOP aspect that automatically retries transactions that run into transient deadlocks.

See @RetryTransaction Javadoc for more info.

I have a method, the internals of which are wrapped in a MySqlTransaction.

The deadlock issue showed up for me when I ran the same method in parallel with itself.

There was not an issue running a single instance of the method.

When I removed MySqlTransaction, I was able to run the method in parallel with itself with no issues.

Just sharing my experience, I'm not advocating anything.

cron is dangerous. If one instance of cron fails to finish before the next is due, they are likely to fight each other.

It would be better to have a continuously running job that would delete some rows, sleep some, then repeat.

Also, INDEX(datetime) is very important for avoiding deadlocks.

But, if the datetime test includes more than, say, 20% of the table, the DELETE will do a table scan. Smaller chunks deleted more often is a workaround.

Another reason for going with smaller chunks is to lock fewer rows.

Bottom line:

• INDEX(datetime)
• Continually running task -- delete, sleep a minute, repeat.
• To make sure that the above task has not died, have a cron job whose sole purpose is to restart it upon failure.

Other deletion techniques: http://mysql.rjweb.org/doc.php/deletebig

@Omry Yadan's answer ( https://stackoverflow.com/a/2423921/1810962 ) can be simplified by using ORDER BY.

Change

DELETE FROM onlineusers 
WHERE datetime <= now() - INTERVAL 900 SECOND

to

DELETE FROM onlineusers 
WHERE datetime <= now() - INTERVAL 900 SECOND
ORDER BY ID

to keep the order in which you delete items consistent. Also if you are doing multiple inserts in a single transaction, make sure they are also always ordered by id.

According to the mysql delete documentation:

If the ORDER BY clause is specified, the rows are deleted in the order that is specified.

You can find a reference here: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/delete.html