Lately I’ve received a number of SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS outputs with embedded “\n” characters appearing as text, but not true line breaks.

Of course this makes reading a long, INNODB STATUS nearly impossible.

With Linux, you can more easily fix this using sed or awk (or if you have those on Windows w/ gnu or cygwin or the like).

I didn’t have either handy, nor a fancy editor (just using WordPad), but I did have a hex editor handy (necessary for such cases as this).

In the hex editor (I use Freeware Hex Editor XVI32 for Windows), fixing this took about 2 seconds.

I just replaced:

5C6E <-- which is the text "\n"

with:

0D0A <-- which is the true carriage return/newline

I realize …

When InnoDB appears hung, I know the natural reaction is to check SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS.

In fact, it’s the first thing I check when InnoDB tables are involved.

However, I just want to iterate how valuable SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST and/or mysqladmin debug outputs can be even when it seems mysqld is hung on on InnoDB table.

Two recent cases I’ve encountered illustrate why.

Case #1:

MySQL appeared hung on the following simple, single-row INSERT:

---TRANSACTION 0 2035648699, ACTIVE 76629 sec, process no 9047,
OS thread id 3069426592, thread declared inside InnoDB 500
mysql tables in use 1, locked 1
...
INSERT INTO test (id, parent, text) VALUES (180370, 70122, 'test table')

At least that’s what it seemed per the INNODB STATUS, but unfortunately, there wasn’t any further information to go on.

The next time it occurred, SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST was captured at the time.

…