[mythtv-users] What might make the backend loose the database connection to localhost?

[Tom Dexter]

Last night I had an odd thing happen.  In the middle of recording
apparently the backend lost it's connection to the database (running
on the same server connected as localhost), and all the sql started
generating errors like this:

2010-10-25 21:00:03.357 DB Error (Resolution insert):
Query was:
INSERT INTO recordedmarkup    (chanid, starttime, mark, type, data)
VALUES ( :CHANID, :STARTTIME,
 :MARK, :TYPE, :DATA);
Bindings were:
:CHANID=1041, :DATA=1920, :MARK=1, :STARTTIME=2010-10-25T21:00:00, :TYPE=30
Driver error was [2/2006]:
QMYSQL: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
MySQL server has gone away

2010-10-25 21:00:03.359 Error preparing query: INSERT INTO
recordedmarkup    (chanid, starttime, mar
k, type, data)    VALUES ( :CHANID, :STARTTIME, :MARK, :TYPE, :DATA);
2010-10-25 21:00:03.376 Driver error was [2/2006]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to prepare statement
Database error was:
MySQL server has gone away

It actually went on like that for almost two hours before I noticed
it.  There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the database.  I even ran
the optimize script to be sure.  I was able to connect to it locally
and remotely with no problem and even mythweb was working.

Restarting the backend fixed it and it was like nothing had happened,
but without that it doesn't appear it ever would have reconnected.

Any ideas what would cause that?  I upgraded to mysql 5.1 (doing all
the appropriate updates etc) well over a month ago, but that went
without a hitch and was fine prior to this.

This is mythtv 0.23.1 rev 25496 running under Gentoo by the way.

Tom