Increasing the odds of long-running procedures completing successfully

On a tunned server, the MySQL Global variable for wait_timeout will likely be tunned rather low. These variables tell MySQL to terminate any open connections that haven't done anything in a while. Since there may be as many as 4 connections open to the database at one time (The Drupal database and the CiviCRM database by both Drupal and CiviCRM) this causes a problem during long running operations. CiviCRM may for example be synchronizing users to contacts for several minutes, finish, and then return control to the CRM. The CRM tries to run a query, only to discover that "The MySQL database has gone away".

Luckily enough you can override this global variable for the current session. I propose something like the following that could be called for things like import, syncing users to contacts, or anything else that is expected to take a long time:

function increaseWaitTimeout() {
// Increase the timeout on the CiviCRM core DB
civicrm_initialize();
require_once('CRM/Core/DAO.php');
CRM_Core_DAO::executeQuery('SET SESSION wait_timeout = 900', CRM_Core_DAO::$_nullArray);

// Do the same for the CRM Host DB.
// Not sure how CiviCRM switches between DBs.

// Do the same for the Host's DBs. Drupal version below.
}

function increaseWaitTimeoutDrupal() {
global db_url;
if (is_array($db_url)) {
foreach ($db_url as $db_key => $db)

{ db_set_active($db_key); db_query('SET SESSION wait_timeout = 900'); }

db_set_active();
}
else

{ db_query('SET SESSION wait_timeout = 900'); }

}