Syfter -

I set up a new VPS with HostGator.com.  The main reason that I didn’t go with my usual at MediaTemple.net is that HostGator allows you to pay monthly with Paypal.  MediaTemple support said I had to pay a year up front if I wanted to use Paypal.  So on to my issue.  I had a couple errors when I was running a script on the server that was doing a ton of database queries and I started getting the dreaded “MySQL Server has Gone Away” error.  I knew it hadn’t gone away because I was logged in to the damned thing.  It was right there in front of me and I was running queries in phpMyAdmin just fine.  So, I did some research and found out that the default setting for:

max_allowed_packet = 1M

I though, wow, that is pretty small these days.  So I changed it to:

max_allowed_packet = 64M

This seems to have fixed all my troubles.  I just wish this worked with my dogs bladders so I wasn’t having to let them out every 15 minutes.

Hope this helps you too!

UPDATE: In case you are looking for your my.cnf it is at /etc/my.cnf for VPS hosting.