Database 'goes away'

[gregorydlogan]

In testing I'm seeing errors like the following too often (note: copy and pasted from StackOveflow, but the gist is the same)

  File "C:\my_proj\db_conduit.py", line 147, in load_some_model
    SomeModel.objects.update()
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django-1.3-py2.6.egg\django\db\models\manager.py", line 177, in update
    return self.get_query_set().update(*args, **kwargs)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django-1.3-py2.6.egg\django\db\models\query.py", line 469, in update
    transaction.commit(using=self.db)
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django-1.3-py2.6.egg\django\db\transaction.py", line 142, in commit
    connection.commit()
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django-1.3-py2.6.egg\django\db\backends\__init__.py", line 201, in commit
    self._commit()
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\django-1.3-py2.6.egg\django\db\backends\__init__.py", line 46, in _commit
    return self.connection.commit()
OperationalError: (2006, 'MySQL server has gone away')

Started seeing this on start of sprint 2, but has since gone away. Unclear what's causing it, but better handling should be built.

[gregorydlogan]

This happened on the ETH test instance tonight but the better error handling from sprint 2 both prevented it from crashing the whole server, and allowed a (manual) retry, which resolved the issue.

Still shouldn't be happening but it's now much lower priority.