[Labs-l] "MySQL server has gone away" errors

[Hay (Husky)]

Hey all,
am i the only one getting repeated "MySQL server has gone away'" error
mails from the Cron daemon on tools? I'm running a hourly script that
indexes toolinfo.json files for the tool directory
(http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory/) and updates data in the
database.

The thing breaks over a very simple query that checks if the current
tool already exists in the database, something that shouldn't take
more than a few milliseconds on a regular setup (see stacktrace below
this mail).

-- Hay

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught exception 'PDOException' with message
'SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away' in
/data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/idiorm/idiorm.php:429
Stack trace:
#0 /data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/idiorm/idiorm.php(429):
PDOStatement->execute()
#1 /data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/idiorm/idiorm.php(1828):
ORM::_execute('SELECT * FROM `...', Array, 'default')
#2 /data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/idiorm/idiorm.php(607): ORM->_run()
#3 /data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/paris/paris.php(135): ORM->find_one(NULL)
#4 /data/project/hay/public_html/directory/lib/class-api.php(47):
ORMWrapper->find_one()
#5 /data/project/hay/public_html/directory/lib/class-api.php(73):
Api->getTool('name', 'xtools-editcoun...')
#6 /data/project/hay/public_html/directory/lib/class-api.php(81):
Api->hasTool('name', 'xtools-editcoun...')
#7 /data/project/hay/public_html/directory/lib/class-crawl.php(56):
Api->hasToolByName('xtools-editcoun...')
#8 /data/project/hay/lib/crawl-tools.php(7): Crawl->__construct() in
/data/project/hay/lib/vendor/j4mie/idiorm/idiorm.php on line 429