MySQL Server Has Gone Away

I was writing a PERL script that would determine the location of several virtual machine which would then update the location of those virtual machines in the database, when I came across an interesting error

MySQL server has gone away

My first thought was “excuse me?” because I was pretty certain that my MySQL server was as active as could be. I then realized after some Googling that my connection was timing out. I found I was opening the MySQL connection early in my PERL script where I didn’t need it. Actually I didn’t need to open the connection until the end of the script. Once I did this everything came together smoothly.