As of MySQL 4.1.11, there is a global system variable slave_transaction_retries: If the slave SQL thread fails to execute a transaction because of an InnoDB deadlock or because it exceeded the InnoDB innodb_lock_wait_timeout or the NDBCLUSTER TransactionDeadlockDetectionTimeout or TransactionInactiveTimeout value, the transaction automatically retries slave_transaction_retries times before stopping with an error. The default value is 0 in MySQL 4.1. The total retry count can be seen in SHOW STATUS; see Section 5.1.5, “Server Status Variables”.