MySQL hangs due to large delete (1 reply)

Hello!
We are currently using MySQL 5.5 running on Ubuntu 12.04.
We have quite a big table and we are doing several large deletes on this table in one batch (We use the executeBatch() method from our JDBC connector). Surprisingly, this causes MySQL to hang completely and not perform any reads or writes for 10-20s.
Its not just the db that is blocking as we have 2 dbs on the same MySQL instance and they both are hanging.

Any help with this would be appreciated!