MYSQL “Got an error reading communication packets”

The setup is a Windows 2003 Server with MySQL 5.0.45 (it is an old-ish box!)

We've recently started getting warnings in the Application Event Log that say: Aborted connection xxxxx ti db: 'dbname' user: 'dbuser' host: localhost' (Got an error reading communication packets)

How do I go about identifying the cause of this? This is a live system - are the users getting an error message and if so what would it be?

Any help greatly appreciated!

Solution 1:

Would you believe I addressed this kind of question back on Jun 12, 2012 ?

See my post in the DBA StackExchange on why.

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW

Try raising the max_allowed_packet to a much larger number, since the default is 1M. I would suggest about 10 times the largest TEXT or BLOB field you have in your current dataset.

To set the max_allowed_packet to 256M, you can add it to /etc/my.cnf or my.ini

[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=256M

to cover future restarts of mysqld. To install the value now on the server, please run this:

SET GLOBAL max_allowed_packet = 1024 * 1024 * 256;

Give it a Try !!!