Lorna Mitchell has a (very) quick tip for those using the Zend Framework with a MySQL database. Sometimes the inevitable "MySQL server has gone away" error will pop up - her tip shows you how to deal with it correctly in a long-running application.

The [Gearman] worker is a Zend Framework application, run from the CLI, and it seemed like the Zend_Db_Adapter had no way of knowing when MySQL had let go of its end of the connection. I tried a few different things, including Zend_Db_Adapter::getConnection(), but without success - until I dug through the source code (with some help from a friend) and realised that ZF was not reconnecting at all if it thought it already had a connection.

She ended up putting a connection into a registry and, when the process was done, forcing the connection to close. This made the next worker in the queue forcefully open another new connection rather than having the same one pending for (possibly) days at a time.