[Server Bug]: Very frequent MariaDB warnings "Got timeout reading communication packets"

[Barbapulpe]

Description

Not sure if this is a bug, but I am getting countless errors (every 5 to 10 minutes, roughly, but not entirely regular) in MariaDB logs as follows:

2025-12-27 12:42:07 43444 [Warning] Aborted connection 43444 to db: 'loopsdb' user: 'loops' host: 'localhost' (Got timeout reading communication packets)

No relevant erros are to be seen in laravel.log nor systemd unit.

I tried to play on MariaDB configuration to no avail, following are an extract of my parameters:

[mysqld]
innodb_log_file_size = 512M
max_connections = 200
thread_cache_size = 16
thread_handling = pool-of-threads
tmp_table_size = 256M
max_heap_table_size = 256M
open_files_limit = 16384
max_allowed_packet = 128M
wait_timeout = 180
interactive_timeout = 300
max_user_connections = 0
optimizer_use_condition_selectivity = 1

Steps to reproduce

1. Install Loops with MariaDB
2. Inspect MariaDB logs

Loops version

v1.0.0-beta6

Acknowledgements

Yes

[dansup]

What's happening:

Queue workers keep persistent DB connections open. When these sit idle longer than MariaDB's wait_timeout (180s in your config), the server closes them, causing these warnings when Laravel tries to use a stale connection.

Solutions to try:

Ensure persistent connections are disabled - In config/database.php, verify your MariaDB connection has:

'options' => [
    PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
]

Restart Horizon/queue workers regularly - Add a cron job to gracefully restart workers:

In crontab

*/30 * * * * php /path/to/loops/artisan horizon:terminate

Or if using supervisor with queue:work, configure stopwaitsecs and restart periodically.

Reduce wait_timeout to match your restart interval - Since workers should restart every 30-60 minutes anyway (to pick up code changes), you could lower wait_timeout to 120s.

Check your Horizon configuration - In config/horizon.php, ensure your workers have reasonable memory and timeout settings so they restart before connections go stale.

[Barbapulpe]

Thanks. So I take it these warnings are not an issue for Loops / Laravel and can be safely ignored?