Some Reasonable Defaults for MySQL Settings Nov 25, 2009, 01 :33 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (2279 reads) (Other stories by Jeremy Zawodny)
"slave_net_timeout
"There is no heartbeat mechanism that helps slaves to know that their connection to a master hasn’t vanished. What can happen is a network connection gets broken between the two in a way that neither detects. This is typically a firewall/router issue or something that neither host initiates or sees, so neither one is able to send (or receive) a TCP packet that would normally begin to shut down the connection. This is especially true of replication topologies that involve crossing significant distances where multiple networks and providers may be involved.
"MySQL uses a simple timeout mechanism to detect this hopefully rare occurrence. If the slave I/O thread has not seen anything from the master in slave_net_timeout seconds, it will connect and then attempt to reconnect and continue replicating. That mechanism works very well and allows slaves to deal with the occasional network glitch.
"Unfortunately the default value for this variable is 3600. That’s a full hour of time that passes before the slave decides to give up and try starting with a new connection. So not only do you run the risk of a slave being nearly an hour behind on replication, you may find that this is trickier to detect than you might think!"
