MySQL error 2006: mysql server has gone away

Question

I'm running a server at my office to process some files and report the results to a remote MySQL server.

The files processing takes some time and the process dies halfway through with the following error:

2006, MySQL server has gone away

I've heard about the MySQL setting, wait_timeout, but do I need to change that on the server at my office or the remote MySQL server?

Answer 1

It was RAM problem for me.

I was having the same problem even on a server with 12 CPU cores and 32 GB RAM. I researched more and tried to free up RAM. Here is the command I used on Ubuntu 14.04 to free up RAM:

sync && echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

And, it fixed everything. I have set it under cron to run every hour.

crontab -e

0 * * * * bash /root/ram.sh;

And, you can use this command to check how much free RAM available:

free -h

And, you will get something like this:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           31G        12G        18G        59M       1.9G       973M
-/+ buffers/cache:       9.9G        21G
Swap:         8.0G       368M       7.6G

Answer 2

I had the same problem but changeing max_allowed_packet in the my.ini/my.cnf file under [mysqld] made the trick.

add a line

max_allowed_packet=500M

now restart the MySQL service once you are done.

Answer 3

Error: 2006 (CR_SERVER_GONE_ERROR)

Message: MySQL server has gone away

Generally you can retry connecting and then doing the query again to solve this problem - try like 3-4 times before completely giving up.

I'll assuming you are using PDO. If so then you would catch the PDO Exception, increment a counter and then try again if the counter is under a threshold.

If you have a query that is causing a timeout you can set this variable by executing:

SET @@GLOBAL.wait_timeout=300;
SET @@LOCAL.wait_timeout=300;  -- OR current session only

Where 300 is the number of seconds you think the maximum time the query could take.

Further information on how to deal with Mysql connection issues.

EDIT: Two other settings you may want to also use is net_write_timeout and net_read_timeout.

Answer 4

In my case it was low value of open_files_limit variable, which blocked the access of mysqld to data files.

I checked it with :

mysql> SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'open%';
+------------------+-------+
| Variable_name    | Value |
+------------------+-------+
| open_files_limit | 1185  |
+------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

After I changed the variable to big value, our server was alive again :

[mysqld]
open_files_limit = 100000

Answer 5

For Vagrant Box, make sure you allocate enough memory to the box

config.vm.provider "virtualbox" do |vb|
  vb.memory = "4096"
end

Answer 6

I used following command in MySQL command-line to restore a MySQL database which size more than 7GB, and it works.

set global max_allowed_packet=268435456;