AWS MySql RDS: "Got error 28 from storage engine"
<p>I’m working on a relatively small application, serving about 1,500 users and running on a Mysql database that is about 300 megs. The entire system runs on AWS with a single dedicated EC2 node running the Grails application on Tomcat 8 and a single dedicated Mysql RDS instance. The system has been running live in production for about three years with no database issues. The two largest tables contain about 40k records. The application is built using Grails and Java 1.7.</p>

<p>Yesterday our application began throwing the following exception, with the underlying error message of:</p>

<blockquote>
  <p>"Got error 28 from storage engine"</p>
</blockquote>

<p>The logs available from the RDS admin web console are empty.</p>

<p>Googling has not revealed any promising leads that have helped us resolve the issue, other than most messages point out that the disk is out of space. Given that most search results refer to disk space. Being software developers rather than DBA's with significant Mysql expertise, we boosted the storage space of the Mysql RDS instance. Unfortunately, today our application is still sporadically throwing the same exception. Having created our Mysql DRS instance with 15 gigs of space -- which is several orders of magnitude of additional space than our application makes use of -- we are at a lost as to what is the root cause of this issue. Our guess is that there is possibly some out of the box Mysql limitation that we are hitting up against but have no idea what it may be or how to solve it. Indeed, the whole reason we host onRDS was to avoid issues of this type.</p>

<p>Doing some Googling, this seems like a somewhat common Mysql error but that does not have any concrete trail for us to follow. Most suggestions talk about checking the filesystem or "inode" space. Given that this is a hosted Mysql RDS instance on AWS, I am unsure if or how to check such things. Looking at the CloudWatch for the RDS instance, I can see that the CPU is idle and that the instance is dramatically under the 15 gig storage limit.</p>

<p>Does anyone have any suggestions for us to investigate?</p>

<p>Given that we are new to RDS, can you please point us to any documentation or -- even better -- suggest what settings we can tweak in the RDS console -- to help prevent this error from occuring? Ideally, we moved to RDS thinking that if this was a mysql sizing or scaling issue that moving to RDS would solve the problem. As a last resort, this morning we then deleted about 20k rows of unessential data. Unfortunately, the issue persists and we continue to experience the issue.</p>

<p>A few questions:</p>

<ol>
<li>Are there any RDS settings we can adjust to avoid this issue?</li>
<li>Can this be solved by moving to a larger RDS instance, perhaps with more memory?</li>
<li>Would we experience this issue if we moved to Aurora?</li>
</ol>