As jay at grooveshark dot com very helpfully pointed out, the mysqlnd driver which is becoming pretty standard does not obey reconnect commands. If you have a DB wrapper class (which hopefully you do) you can implement your own version of ping() such as:
<?php
class db extends mysqli
{
private $db_host;
private $db_user;
private $db_pass;
private $db_name;
private $persistent;
public function __construct($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass, $db_name, $persistent = true)
{
$this->db_host = $db_host;
$this->db_user = $db_user;
$this->db_pass = $db_pass;
$this->db_name = $db_name;
$this->persistent = $persistent;
parent::init();
parent::options(MYSQLI_OPT_CONNECT_TIMEOUT, 1);
@parent::real_connect(($this->persistent ? 'p:' : '') . $this->db_host, $this->db_user, $this->db_pass, $this->db_name);
if ($this->connect_errno)
die("All DB servers down!\n");
}
public function ping()
{
@parent::query('SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()');
if ($this->errno == 2006)
$this->__construct($this->db_host, $this->db_user, $this->db_pass, $this->db_name, $this->persistent);
}
...
}
$db = new db(DB_HOST, DB_USER, DB_PASS, DB_NAME);
$db->ping();
$db->query('SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()');
?>
If you wanted you could even put "$this->ping();" at the top of db::query() to avoid any explicit reconnection calls but I wouldn't recommend it due to the (slight) overhead of running the cheap "SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()" query every time prior to running your real intended query. There are probably even cheaper queries to run in favor of "SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID()" but it was the first that came to mind and is cheap enough for most purposes since you shouldn't be calling ping() a whole bunch anyway.