title: Intermittent 2013, "Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 0" to CloudSQL
body: <p>I setup an old Django app on a new GCE instance on Sunday and pointed it to a new CloudSQL instance with imported data there. This code and data has successfully run over the past few years on a variety of dedicated hosting setups, on EC2 and on EC2+RDS.</p>
  
  <p>Since Sunday I have had intermittent reports of 2013, "Lost connection to MySQL server at 'reading initial communication packet', system error: 0" from the App. In particular today it happened in two bursts of 3 separated by about 7 hours. </p>
  
  <p>I panicked in the earlier outages and restarted both the app and the CloudSQL instance which did the trick. However the latter ones today righted themselves after a few minutes. </p>
  
  <p>I've never encountered this error before working with MySQL and any searching on the error gives results related to people who have general access problems to the DB.</p>
  
  <p>On the GCE side the only difference I can think of from previous setups is that it is using Google's out-of-the-box Debian image instead of Ubuntu 12.04. On the MySQL side I have no idea as I've successfully run this on both MySQL 5.x and MariaDB.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way of figuring out why this is happening and fixing it? </p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>