Troubleshoot MySQL

For more general information, see how to troubleshoot development.

Lock wait timeout

If a process running in your application acquired a lock from MySQL for a long period of time, you receive MySQL error messages like this:

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

This is typically caused by one of the following:

• There are multiple places acquiring locks in different order. For example, code path 1 first locks record A and then locks record B, while code path 2 first locks record B and then locks record A.
• There is a long running background process executed by your application that holds the lock until it ends.

If you’re using MariaDB 10+, use the SQL query SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST \G to list DB queries waiting for locks. To determine where to debug, find output like the following:

< skipped >
Command: Query
Time: ...
State: Waiting for table metadata lock
Info: SELECT ...
< skipped >

To find active background processes, run ps aufx on your application container.

Make sure that locks are acquired in a pre-defined order and released as soon as possible.

Definer/invoker of view lack rights to use them

There is a single MySQL user, so you can not use “DEFINER” Access Control mechanism for Stored Programs and Views.

When creating a VIEW, you may need to explicitly set the SECURITY parameter to INVOKER:

CREATE OR REPLACE SQL SECURITY INVOKER
VIEW `view_name` AS
SELECT

Server has gone away

Disk space issues

Errors such as PDO Exception 'MySQL server has gone away' are usually the result of exhausting your available disk space. Get an estimate of current disk usage using the CLI command platform db:size. Just keep in mind it’s an estimate and not exact.

Allocate more space to the service in .platform/services.yaml. As table space can grow rapidly, it’s usually advisable to make your database mount size twice the size reported by the db:size command.

You may want to add a low-disk warning to learn about low disk space before it becomes an issue.

Packet size limitations

MySQL server has gone away errors may be caused by the size of the database packets. If so, the logs may show warnings like Error while sending QUERY packet before the error.

One way to resolve the issue is to use the max_allowed_packet parameter.

Worker timeout

MySQL server has gone away errors may be caused by server timeouts. MySQL has a built-in timeout for idle connections, which defaults to 10 minutes. Most typical web connections end long before that’s ever approached, but a long-running worker may idle and not need the database for longer than the timeout, leading to a “server has gone away” message.

The best approach is to wrap your connection logic in code that detects a “server has gone away” exception and tries to re-establish the connection.

Alternatively, if your worker is idle for too long it can self-terminate. Platform.sh automatically restarts the worker process and the new process can establish a new database connection.

Too many connections

You may get the following error message: Error 1040: Too many connections. A common way to solve this issue is to increase the max_connections property in your MariaDB service configuration. However, on Platform.sh, you cannot configure max_connections directly.

Quick fix

You cannot configure max_connections directly in Platform.sh service configurations. However, to solve Error 1040, you can increase max_connections indirectly.

For example, in the following service configuration for MariaDB, max_connections is 188 as set by Platform.sh:

# The name of the service container. Must be unique within a project.
mariadb:
  type: mariadb:11.4
  disk: 2048
  size: L
  configuration:
    properties:
      max_allowed_packet: 16

To increase max_connections, you can either:

• decrease max_allowed_packet (for example, 16 → 15 results in max_connections=201)
• or increase size (for example, L → XL results in max_connections=356)

How it works

Behind the scenes, max_connections (for Professional and DG3 projects) is calculated from values that you can change:

1. max_allowed_packet: max_allowed_packet is directly configurable in your .platform/services.yaml file with an integer value. The default value of 16 is shown below to illustrate:

   .platform/services.yaml

   # The name of the service container. Must be unique within a project.
   mariadb:
     type: mariadb:11.4
     disk: 2048
     configuration:
       properties:
          max_allowed_packet: 16

2. The memory available to the service: Resources are distributed across the containers in a cluster based on your Platform.sh plan size. The strategy for how resources are distributed can either be determined for you by Platform.sh (equivalent to setting size: AUTO) or by setting a container size explicitly:

   .platform/services.yaml

   # The name of the service container. Must be unique within a project.
   mariadb:
     type: mariadb:11.4
     disk: 2048
     size: L
     configuration:
       properties:
         max_allowed_packet: 16

   The memory for a given container from its size depends on its container profile***.

   For example, MariaDB has a HIGH_MEMORY container profile. For size: L, it means 0.40 CPU and 1280 MB of memory.

If we assume the configuration above, where:

• mariadb.size: L, which we know is 1280 MB, referred to below as application_size
• mariadb.configuration.properties.max_allowed_packet: 16

max_allowed_packet is 188, which is determined by Platform.sh according to:

\begin{aligned} \texttt{max_connections} = \text{int}\Biggl[ \min \left( \frac{\texttt{FREE_MEMORY}}{\texttt{max_allowed_packet}}, 500 \right) \Biggr] \end{aligned}

This calculation uses three additional calculations:

\begin{aligned} \texttt{FREE_MEMORY} = \texttt{AVAILABLE_MEMORY} - \left( 50 + \texttt{innodb_buffer_pool_size} \right) \newline \newline \texttt{AVAILABLE_MEMORY} = (\texttt{application_size} * 2) + 512 \newline \newline \texttt{innodb_buffer_pool_size} = \frac{\text{int}\left( 0.75 \cdot \texttt{application_size} \right)}{1024^{2}} \end{aligned}

So for our current example, where:

\begin{aligned} \texttt{application_size} = 1280 \newline \texttt{max_allowed_packet} = 16 \end{aligned}

You get:

\begin{aligned} \texttt{innodb_buffer_pool_size} = \frac{\text{int}\left( 0.75 \cdot \texttt{application_size} \right)}{1024^{2}} = \frac{\text{int}\left( 0.75 \cdot \texttt{1280} \right)}{1024^{2}} \approx 9.155 \times 10^{-4} \end{aligned}

\begin{aligned} \texttt{AVAILABLE_MEMORY} = (\texttt{application_size} * 2) + 512 = (1280 * 2) + 512 = 3072 \end{aligned}

\begin{aligned} \texttt{FREE_MEMORY} = \texttt{AVAILABLE_MEMORY} - \left( 50 + \texttt{innodb_buffer_pool_size} \right) \newline \newline \texttt{FREE_MEMORY} = 3072 - \left( 50 + 0.0009155… \right) = 3021.999084 \end{aligned}

\begin{aligned} \texttt{max_connections} = \text{int}\Biggl[ \min \left( \frac{\texttt{FREE_MEMORY}}{\texttt{max_allowed_packet}}, 500 \right) \Biggr] = \text{int}\Biggl[ \min \left( \frac{3021.999084}{16}, 500 \right) \Biggr] = \text{int}\Biggl[ 188.87… \Biggr] \end{aligned}

\begin{aligned} \texttt{max_connections} = 188 \end{aligned}

The following table provides additional example calculations of max_connections for all size settings and for a number of max_allow_packet settings.