phpMyAdmin hangs server by doing a COUNT(*) when going to “Browse”

Question

I have a very large table (~115 million rows). When I click it in phpMyAdmin everything blows up. By doing a SHOW PROCESSLIST; I can see that it's because phpMyAdmin has tried to execute the following query:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `friend_map`.`connections`

Since this is an innoDB table this requires a table scan and the server errors out before returning.

It gives the error:

Error in Processing Request
Error code: 504
Error text: Gateway Timeout

I have to manually kill the mysql process or the entire database remains unresponsive.

Is there a way to tell phpMyAdmin not to execute this query?

Edit: I should probably also note that I'm in the middle of a server migration. This worked fine with phpMyAdmin 3.5.1 but now I've switched to new servers and this error is happening on phpMyAdmin 4.1.3.

Answer 1

This appears to be an open issue with phpMyAdmin 4.x. More details are here: http://sourceforge.net/p/phpmyadmin/bugs/4027/?page=0

I was able to fix this by adding $force_exact = false; to line 573 of libraries/Table.class.php.