How to debug Lock wait timeout exceeded on MySQL?

Question

In my production error logs I occasionally see:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1205 Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction

Answer 1

The big problem with this exception is that its usually not reproducible in a test environment and we are not around to run innodb engine status when it happens on prod. So in one of the projects I put the below code into a catch block for this exception. That helped me catch the engine status when the exception happened. That helped a lot.

Statement st = con.createStatement();
ResultSet rs =  st.executeQuery("SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS");
while(rs.next()){
    log.info(rs.getString(1));
    log.info(rs.getString(2));
    log.info(rs.getString(3));
}