MySQL Errors
 

Over the past month or so* I've randomly* yet consistently* been getting the following MySQL error:

....
MySQL Error : MySQL server has gone away
Error Number : 2006
....

While I've never personally encountered it* I just noticed that there was a bunch of error report emails about it in my inbox. The pages where it happened seemed to be mostly random.

Does this just mean that the server is timing out from time to time? Is there some configuration parameter that I might want to change? I don't think my users are actually seeing this error* as otherwise they would have spoken up.