Slow Save & "MySQL gone away" Error - Problem

[Shantonu Acharjee]

I'm providing an update on my product saving issue on PrestaShop 8.2.0, hosted on a Hostinger Business plan. Thank you for the help so far.

The Original Problem (Still Happening):

Saving a product is always slow. When I assign many categories (10-15+), the save process takes over a minute and fails with a General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away error.

Troubleshooting Update:

• I recently enabled a visitor tracking module and thought it might be causing the slowdown.
• I have now completely disabled that module and cleared the cache.

Unfortunately, the problem is not solved. The exact same issue persists: saves are slow, and it fails when many categories are involved.

The Full Error Message (Still the Same):

An unexpected error occurred. [Doctrine\DBAL\Exception\ConnectionLost code 0]: An exception occurred while executing 'SELECT ...': SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away

Revised Question:

Since disabling the module had no effect, my focus is back on a server configuration or database performance issue. The operation to link a product to many categories seems too slow for my server's timeout limit.

What are the specific values for MySQL settings like wait_timeout and max_allowed_packet that I should ask Hostinger support to set?

Could this be a deeper problem, like poor database indexing on the ps_category_product table, that makes the query itself too slow?

Any further ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[ajin5522]

Yeah, that MySQL server has gone away error almost always points to either a timeout or packet size issue, not really a Prestashop bug. When saving products with lots of categories, Prestashop runs a big insert/update on the ps_category_product table, and if it takes too long or the query size exceeds limits, MySQL just drops the connection.

Ask Hostinger support to bump these settings in my.cnf:

wait_timeout = 300 
max_allowed_packet = 256M 
innodb_log_file_size = 512M

If you still see the error after that, check for missing indexes on ps_category_product — especially if that table has grown large over time. Running ANALYZE TABLE ps_category_product; and OPTIMIZE TABLE ps_category_product; can also help.

And if the table is already corrupted or performing inconsistently, you can repair it with mysqlcheck or use a third-party repair utility like Stellar Repair for MySQL to rebuild it safely without data loss.