18.3 How MySQL handles a full disk

When a disk full condition occurs, MySQL does the following:

• It checks once every minute to see whether or not there is enough space to write the current row. If there is enough space, it continues as if nothing had happened.
• Every 6 minutes it writes an entry to the log file warning about the disk full condition.

To alleviate the problem, you can take the following actions:

• To continue, you only have to free enough disk space to insert all records.
• To abort the thread, you must send a mysqladmin kill to the thread. The thread will be aborted the next time it checks the disk (in 1 minute).
• Note that other threads may be waiting for the table that caused the ``disk full'' condition. If you have several ``locked'' threads, killing the one thread that is waiting on the disk full condition will allow the other threads to continue.