MySQL error log says "Got timeout reading communication packets"

Symptoms

In some MySQL configurations, you may find that connections to databases continuously timeout and correspond to the following entries in the MySQL error log:

[Warning] Aborted connection to db: 'username_site' user: 'username_site' host: 'localhost' (Got timeout reading communication packets)

Description 

In some cases, this could be caused by the value set for the following setting in ones configuration ( /etc/my.cnf ):

wait_timeout=30

In the above case, connections would timeout every 30 seconds.

Workaround

Refer to the MySQL documentation for wait_timeout to ensure it's set in accordance with your needs.