Re: MySQL server has gone away

>given that a reasonable server should be able to 
>handle hunredts to thousands of requests per second anything above 1 
>second is a alert sign
Excuse me, do you mean higher values are better? I didn't understand. I said in my posts that when I submit the email test, the refresh time for that page is about 5 minutes. 

>look also in phpinfo() for mysqlnd and mysql params containing "timeout" 
>and/or "max"
in /etc/php/7.0/apache2/php.ini I see
;mysqlnd.net_read_timeout = 31536000

Note that is comment.

 Regards,
Mahmood