The alter_online grammars are for hunting server crashes when concurrent DDL meets concurrent DML in transactions. Please note that MySQL/InnoDB decide depending on the situation if some ALTER TABLE operation will use the old ALTER TABLE algorithm (COPY) or the new ALTER TABLE algorithm (INPLACE). Recommended RQG setup: duration = 1200, queries = 30000, threads ~ 12 lock-wait-timeout = 2, innodb-lock-wait-timeout = 1, default-storage-engine = 'InnoDB',