InnoDB Update that takes a long time (2 replies)

Today a colleague ran an update on a large table:

mysql> show table status from auto like 'parts'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
           Name: parts
         Engine: InnoDB
        Version: 10
     Row_format: Compact
           Rows: 16209517
 Avg_row_length: 1374
    Data_length: 22272802816
Max_data_length: 0
   Index_length: 16715235328
      Data_free: 754974720
 Auto_increment: NULL
    Create_time: 2008-04-27 12:57:08
    Update_time: NULL
     Check_time: NULL
      Collation: latin1_swedish_ci
       Checksum: NULL
 Create_options:
        Comment: Parts Table
1 row in set (0.76 sec)

Server> ls -lh | grep parts.ibd
-rw-rw----   1 mysql    mysql        38G Oct 26 14:07 parts.ibd

The update was a simple one:

UPDATE parts
set
column = 'Y'

He asked me to kill his thread after about ~30 minutes. So I did. The query state then changed to Freeing Items. He ran the query without a where clause accidentally.

I tried desperately to clear the state so that other transactions could process more efficiently.

However, nothing I did brought the server back any more quickly. It took ~30 minutes more to complete whatever steps it was performing and return to normal operations.

The things I tried were;

* Disable the Query Cache and set the cache size to 0
* Flush Logs
* Reset Query Cache
* Flush Tables parts

I am wondering if folks have any insight as to a> what the server does when it is 'freeing up items' and b> how to achieve that more quickly?

As an aside, the flush tables was something I found online. That actually caused all of the queries to queue up until I killed my thread. I have now noticed that a single table should be 'flush table table_name' and not 'flush table'S' table_name' I am not sure if that would still try to flush all of the tables!

Thanks for any insight!!!

Shawn