24/7 support from senior MySQL engineers with a 15-minute emergency response

Overview

A booking platform saw deadlocks and lock wait timeouts spike during peak sales periods, exactly when failures were most costly. Errors were being retried blindly by the application, which amplified the contention. AceMQ took over MySQL support with named senior engineers and direct escalation.

Challenge

InnoDB lock contention is rarely fixed by tuning alone; it usually comes from statement ordering and transaction scope in application code. Complicating matters, a reporting job held a read view open for long periods, causing the InnoDB history list to grow and making every affected query traverse longer undo chains. The two problems reinforced each other under load.

Environment

MySQL clusters spanning on-premises and cloud capacity, backing reservation and payment workflows.

Approach

AceMQ read the deadlock records and lock wait diagnostics to identify the actual conflicting statement pairs, then traced them back to the application transactions that produced them. Fixes targeted transaction scope and access ordering, with configuration changes used only where they genuinely helped.

Solution

• Analyzed deadlock records and lock wait diagnostics to identify the specific conflicting statement pairs
• Traced conflicts back to application transactions and corrected the row access ordering causing them
• Reduced transaction scope so external calls no longer executed while row locks were held
• Identified the long-running reporting read view driving history list growth and moved it to a dedicated replica
• Replaced blind application retries with bounded backoff so contention no longer amplified itself
• Established 24/7 escalation to senior engineers with a 15-minute response commitment for peak-period incidents

Outcome

Technologies