You can see the process list, find out who is doing what and kill a process if needed.
If you log into PHPmyAdmin and enter the following into the SQL text box :
show processlist;
You will see a list of the processes.
If you are using the mysql command line environment then you can do it at the command line as well
mysql> show processlist;
Once you know the process ID you can then kill the process using the ID number as follows :
mysql>kill 349
Here are some further functions that may be of interest :
show status;
show table status like ‘%’;
The above gives you create time and other information.
All can be run from within PHPmyAdmin or from the mysql command line.