Why is DELETE so much slower than SELECT, then DELETE by id?

Question

I have a fairly busy InnoDB table (200,000 rows, I guess something like tens of queries per second). Due to a bug I got 14 rows with (the same) invalid email addresses in them and wanted to delete them.

I simply tried DELETE FROM table WHERE email='invalid address' and got "Lock wait timeout exceeded" after about 50 seconds. This is not terribly surprising, since the row column is not indexed.

However, I then did SELECT id FROM table WHERE email='invalid address' and that took 1.25 seconds. Running DELETE FROM table WHERE id in (...), copy-pasting the ids from the SELECT result, took 0.02 seconds.

What is going on? Can someone explain why the DELETE with the condition is so slow that it times out, but doing SELECT and then deleting by id is so fast?

Thanks.

EDIT: By request, I posted the table structure as well as some explain results. I should also note that there are no foreign keys referring to this table.

However, the situation seems straightforward to me: I have an unindexed field that I'm selecting against. This requires scanning the whole table, but it's not terribly big. id is the primary key, so deleting by id is very quick, as it should be.

mysql> show create table ThreadNotification2 \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
       Table: ThreadNotification2
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `ThreadNotification2` (
  `id` bigint(20) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `alertId` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  `day` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `frequency` int(11) DEFAULT NULL,
  `hour` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `email` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `highlightedTitle` longtext,
  `newReplies` bit(1) NOT NULL,
  `numReplies` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `postUrl` longtext,
  `sendTime` datetime DEFAULT NULL,
  `sent` bit(1) NOT NULL,
  `snippet` longtext,
  `label_id` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  `organization_id` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  `threadEntity_hash` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
  `user_uid` bigint(20) DEFAULT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `FK3991E9D279251FE` (`organization_id`),
  KEY `FK3991E9D35FC0C96` (`label_id`),
  KEY `FK3991E9D3FFC22CB` (`user_uid`),
  KEY `FK3991E9D5376B351` (`threadEntity_hash`),
  KEY `scheduleSentReplies` (`day`,`frequency`,`hour`,`sent`,`numReplies`),
  KEY `sendTime` (`sendTime`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK3991E9D279251FE` FOREIGN KEY (`organization_id`) REFERENCES `Organization` (`id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK3991E9D35FC0C96` FOREIGN KEY (`label_id`) REFERENCES `Label` (`id`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK3991E9D3FFC22CB` FOREIGN KEY (`user_uid`) REFERENCES `User` (`uid`),
  CONSTRAINT `FK3991E9D5376B351` FOREIGN KEY (`threadEntity_hash`) REFERENCES `ThreadEntity` (`hash`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=4461945 DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8
1 row in set (0.08 sec)

mysql> explain SELECT * FROM ThreadNotification2 WHERE email='invalid address';
+----+-------------+---------------------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table               | type | possible_keys | key  | key_len | ref  | rows   | Extra       |
+----+-------------+---------------------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | ThreadNotification2 | ALL  | NULL          | NULL | NULL    | NULL | 197414 | Using where |
+----+-------------+---------------------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+--------+-------------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)


mysql> explain select * from ThreadNotification2 where id in (3940042,3940237,3941132,3941255,3941362,3942535,3943064,3944134,3944228,3948122,3953081,3957876,3963849,3966951);
+----+-------------+---------------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
| id | select_type | table               | type  | possible_keys | key     | key_len | ref  | rows | Extra       |
+----+-------------+---------------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
|  1 | SIMPLE      | ThreadNotification2 | range | PRIMARY       | PRIMARY | 8       | NULL |   14 | Using where |
+----+-------------+---------------------+-------+---------------+---------+---------+------+------+-------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)



mysql> delete from ThreadNotification2 where email='invalid address';
ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction
mysql> select id from ThreadNotification2 where email='invalid address';
+---------+
| id      |
+---------+
| 3940042 |
| 3940237 |
| 3941132 |
| 3941255 |
| 3941362 |
| 3942535 |
| 3943064 |
| 3944134 |
| 3944228 |
| 3948122 |
| 3953081 |
| 3957876 |
| 3963849 |
| 3966951 |
+---------+
14 rows in set (1.25 sec)

mysql> delete from ThreadNotification2 where id in (3940042,3940237,3941132,3941255,3941362,3942535,3943064,3944134,3944228,3948122,3953081,3957876,3963849,3966951);
Query OK, 14 rows affected (0.02 sec)

Answer 1

If the field email is unindexed, then both DELETE and SELECT should work equally slow.

The only possibility I can think of is: You say that the table is heavily accessed. Maybe someone else ran a very long transaction (involving directly or indirectly those specific rows) while you were trying to execute the DELETE.

I think maybe you should insert some mock rows there and try to delete them. Do that 2 or 3 times. If there is a big difference in the duration of the DELETE, then the DB load is probably the reason.

PS: Do that only if people won't be annoyed by those mock rows :D .