In MySQL 5.0 (starting from 5.0.3), 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 slave automatically retries the transaction slave_transaction_retries times before stopping with an error. The default value is 10. Starting from MySQL 5.0.4, the total retry count can be seen in the output of SHOW STATUS; see Section 5.1.6, “Server Status Variables”.