What is actual difference between wait_timeout
and interactive_timeout
?

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1 Answers
interactive_time
is for interactive sessions, whereas wait_timeout
is for non-interactive sessions.
What's an interactive session? It's one with a human at the keyboard.
When your code connects to MySQL, runs a query and then spends 3 seconds processing that query before disconnecting, that's 3 seconds of the wait_timeout
.
When you use the mysql
command line client to connect, run a command and spend 10 seconds reading the output, that's 10 seconds of interactive_timeout
. If you walk away and have lunch, that's 3600 seconds of interactive_timeout
.
In both cases, when you or your code runs another query, the waiting time is reset back to 0.
You can see the values for all the current sessions by typing show processlist
. The values in the sleep(5)
function is the number of seconds since that connection last did anything.

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thank you, this helped me a lot to understand the difference, very well explained. – Fernando Gabrieli Nov 28 '18 at 16:43
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1so let's say I have a query that takes 2 minutes to run, would MySQL disconnect my connections if wait_timeout is less than 2 minutes? – Soheil Rahsaz Dec 14 '20 at 07:12