Python and Django OperationalError (2006, 'MySQL server has gone away')

Question

Original: I have recently started getting MySQL OperationalErrors from some of my old code and cannot seem to trace back the problem. Since it was working before, I thought it may have been a software update that broke something. I am using python 2.7 with django runfcgi with nginx. Here is my original code:

views.py

DBNAME = "test"
DBIP = "localhost"
DBUSER = "django"
DBPASS = "password"
db = MySQLdb.connect(DBIP,DBUSER,DBPASS,DBNAME)
cursor = db.cursor()

def list(request):
    statement = "SELECT item from table where selected = 1"
    cursor.execute(statement)
    results = cursor.fetchall()

I have tried the following, but it still does not work:

views.py

class DB:
    conn = None
    DBNAME = "test"
    DBIP = "localhost"
    DBUSER = "django"
    DBPASS = "password"
def connect(self):
    self.conn = MySQLdb.connect(DBIP,DBUSER,DBPASS,DBNAME)
def cursor(self):
    try:
        return self.conn.cursor()
    except (AttributeError, MySQLdb.OperationalError):
        self.connect()
        return self.conn.cursor()

db = DB()
cursor = db.cursor()

def list(request):
    cursor = db.cursor()
    statement = "SELECT item from table where selected = 1"
    cursor.execute(statement)
    results = cursor.fetchall()

Currently, my only workaround is to do MySQLdb.connect() in each function that uses mysql. Also I noticed that when using django's manage.py runserver, I would not have this problem while nginx would throw these errors. I doubt that I am timing out with the connection because list() is being called within seconds of starting the server up. Were there any updates to the software I am using that would cause this to break/is there any fix for this?

Edit: I realized that I recently wrote a piece of middle-ware to daemonize a function and this was the cause of the problem. However, I cannot figure out why. Here is the code for the middle-ware

def process_request_handler(sender, **kwargs):
    t = threading.Thread(target=dispatch.execute,
        args=[kwargs['nodes'],kwargs['callback']],
        kwargs={})
    t.setDaemon(True)
    t.start()
    return
process_request.connect(process_request_handler)

Answer 1

Sometimes if you see "OperationalError: (2006, 'MySQL server has gone away')", it is because you are issuing a query that is too large. This can happen, for instance, if you're storing your sessions in MySQL, and you're trying to put something really big in the session. To fix the problem, you need to increase the value of the max_allowed_packet setting in MySQL.

The default value is 1048576.

So see the current value for the default, run the following SQL:

select @@max_allowed_packet;

To temporarily set a new value, run the following SQL:

set global max_allowed_packet=10485760;

To fix the problem more permanently, create a /etc/my.cnf file with at least the following:

[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet = 16M

After editing /etc/my.cnf, you'll need to restart MySQL or restart your machine if you don't know how.