[Catalyst] Various login problems

[Jesse Sheidlower]

For the past few months, with two of my Cat apps, I've been
having unpredictable problems where a logged-in user would get
redirected back to the login page, and could not re-login
again. After some amount of time, the user would be able to
log in.

This was sporadic and I never managed to be online when it
was happening, so I had no idea how to even start to evaluate
it. However, the other day it happened when I was on the 
server, and I saw that the error log was getting this:

DBD::mysql::st execute failed: MySQL server has gone away at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Catalyst/Plugin/Session/Store/DBI.pm line 30.

DBD::mysql::st fetchrow_array failed: fetch() without execute() at /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.7/Catalyst/Plugin/Session/Store/DBI.pm line 31.

Now, the server had certainly not gone away in this time; when
this was happening I was able to log in to the MySQL server,
and other apps running on the server were able to hit the
database. 

Restarting Apache fixes the problem immediately. I'm using
the standard Cat session and auth stuff, all set up pretty
much as the docs suggest. (I'm happy to post these if it
would help.)

Any suggestions what might be causing this, or where I should
start to try to figure it out? Keep in mind that I cannot seem
to force this to happen, so when it's OK, as it is now, I can't
get it started.

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower