Peter Marklund's Home

I've gotten a few error messages lately where a plain vanilla ActiveRecord counter cache update (update_counters_without_lock method) has lead to an error being thrown from Mysql - "Mysql::Error: Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction: UPDATE `events` SET `attendees_count` = COALESCE(`attendees_count`, 0) + 1 WHERE (`id` = 1067)".

It seems someone else has tried to report this as a bug but Mysql is saying that it's a feature and is referring to the lock modes documentation. There is some interesting info on deadlocks in InnoDB over at rubyisms. I haven't had time to dig into the theory though. Has anybody else had this issue? What can be done about it (other than switch to PostgreSQL)?