2006 - mysql server has gone away

[basnyd]

Hi -

I'm running oscmax 2. Just recently for categories that are carrying a large number of products (over 200), when a fellow admin logins via dial-up and goes to view a product listing in the category she sees the following message:

2006 - mysql server has gone away

select products_name from products_description where products id = 1834 & language_id = 1

tep stop

2006 - mysql server has gone away

select count (*) as total from session where session_key = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

And then after below this she sees the products listed.

I do not see this from my computer, connecting via cable modem. She also does not see this error when she access categories with fewer products (20 or under).

Most categories are either 200 or more products or 20 or less products. Not much in between.

So, I'm thinking this may be a timeout she is hitting via dial-up, that I don't hit via cable modem. Is there a particular setting I should look at increasing? Use cache equals false under admin. The config file is also set with define('USE_PCONNECT', 'false');

Thanks,
Barb

[jpf]

From what I see is most likely something to do with your server.

Two most common reasons (and fixes) for the MySQL server has gone away (error 2006) are:

1. Server timed out and closed the connection. How to fix: check that wait_timeout variable in your mysqld’s my.cnf configuration file is large enough. On Debian: sudo nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf, set wait_timeout to at least 600 seconds (you can tweak/decrease this value when error 2006 is gone), then sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart. I didn’t check, but the default value for wait_timeout might be around 28800 seconds (8 hours).
2. Server dropped an incorrect or too large packet. If mysqld gets a packet that is too large or incorrect, it assumes that something has gone wrong with the client and closes the connection. You can increase the maximal packet size limit by increasing the value of max_allowed_packet in my.cnf file. On Debian: sudo nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf, set max_allowed_packet to to something like 64M (you can tweak/decrease this value when error 2006 is gone), then sudo /etc/init.d/mysql restart.



Basically "MySQL server has gone away" error is caused by a query longer than the max_allowed_packet. Ether the setting is too low - or an SQL query is going wild and is tring to pull too much.