MySQL server has gone away error
 

Hi,

This problem involves custom code on my 3.6.8 system, but I hope perhaps somebody can shed some light.

I have a custom Daily Digest HTML email generator that runs via the standard Cron system. It uses standard VB db calls to access the database ( $vbulletin->db->query_first(), $vbulletin->db->query(), etc.)

I have recently begun to to receive the following error:

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

This happens at random places in the code, sometime after 100s of iterations of a loop, sometimes near the beginning of the code.

The queries where its dying are NOT long queries. There is no reason that the mySQL servers should be timing out.

My ISP has increased the Wait_timeout value to 5 minutes up from 30 seconds, but I don't think that has helped.

I have recently changed the config file to use persistent connections, and that seems to have helped, but I think it errored at least once since.

These errors may have begun not long after I switched to PHP 5.

Do I have anything to fear about using persistent connections on a shared server? My site has an average of about 50 active users (active withing 30 minutes).

Any other ideas on what might be causing this problem?

Thanks!