Kill a Ton of Queries in MySQL

Every so often I'll have a misbehaving query that read locks a table that is essential for every other query in our application. Obviously this is a bug in our application that should have never made it past the Q/A process, but lets get back to the real world where programmers make these mistakes and Q/A isn't perfect. When this happens, a ton of queries backup behind the query that read locked the table. At this point, simply killing the primary query isn't going to fix the problem, because the load generated by all the queries waiting for the read lock to end will kill the server. There is only two solutions at this point, restart MySQL or kill all the stuck queries. Killing all the queries is really the best solution for our application, but the number is typically daunting. Most of the time I've got as many queries as whatever my connection limit is set to. So I came up with this little one-liner to get a list of all the processes for a user on the server, and kill them.

mysql -u username -ppassword -e "show processlist" | sed '1d' | grep mysql_username | awk '{print "kill ", $1, ";"}' | xargs -i mysql -u username -ppassword -e "{}"

I'm sure someone has a better way to do this, but this works pretty awesomely.