Gnucash in "MySQL server has gone away" loop

[John Ralls]

On Oct 1, 2011, at 8:39 PM, Christopher X. Candreva wrote:

>>> I'm not that familiar with MySql, but it sounds like the database has
>>> problems. Can you connect to it with the mysql client program? Does
>>> mysqlcheck report any errors? Are the permissions correct?
> 
> I've connected both with the mysql command line and phpMyAdmin, and dumped 
> the database with mysqldump, so I'm sure the user can access it. Moreover, 
> I've been writing to the same database for over a month.  It's not dieing on 
> the initial connect, it does quite a bit of work before it goes into the 
> reconnect loop.
> 
> This same server runs my Mythtv backend, which makes heavy use of the mysql 
> server and is not having any problems. (I shutdown mythv while testing so I 
> know it's not putting a load that is causing the problem)
> 
> Recapping, saving to SQL from a month old XML file will work. I'm guessing 
> it's either some data I entered last time, or something about the size I've 
> reached.
> 
> I've placed both the gnucash.trace and mysql transaction log files at 
> http://www.westnet.com/~chris/gnucash/ If this helps. They are from the same 
> run, so the time stamps should match. You can see in the mysql log that 55 
> querys are performed successfully before it enters the reconnect loop. The 
> trace ends with me hitting Ctrl-C
> 

So it looks like a couple of queries are hanging up. There may be two separate issues here:
* Either the splits or slots table (I'd vote for slots, just because it tends to be problematic) is corrupted somehow so that the 
queries to retrieve them time out.

* When a query times out, Gnucash goes into a reconnect loop and effectively hangs. I'll have a look at that code and try to figure out what's going on.

Do I understand correctly that you did a mysqldump of the current database and successfully (meaning that you were able to open it from Gnucash) restored it on your client machine? If that's the case, perhaps restoring it onto your server will get you going again. 

Have you tried running mysqlcheck on the db? 

Regards,
John Ralls