As per the MySQL documentation, your error message is raised when the client can't send a question to the server, most likely because the server itself has closed the connection. In the most common case the server will close an idle connection after a (default) of 8 hours. This is configurable on the server side.
The MySQL documentation gives a number of other possible causes which might be worth looking into to see if they fit your situation.
An alternative to calling connect()
in every function (which might end up needlessly creating new connections) would be to investigate using the ping()
method on the connection object; this tests the connection with the option of attempting an automatic reconnect. I struggled to find some decent documentation for the ping()
method online, but the answer to this question might help.
Note, automatically reconnecting can be dangerous when handling transactions as it appears the reconnect causes an implicit rollback (and appears to be the main reason why autoreconnect is not a feature of the MySQLdb implementation).