HI,

Sorry for what's probably a newbie question, but I've being having real issues with the error "mysql server has gone away" when running certain queries on an PHP application my VPS.

Can any point me in the direction of some resource that would indicate which factors in my code would likely cause this error?

The most common reason for the MySQL server has gone away error is that the server timed out and closed the connection. In this case, you normally get one of the following error codes (which one you get is operating system-dependent).

CR_SERVER_GONE_ERROR - the client could not send a request to the server.
CR_SERVER_LOST - the client send the request to the server but the server response was incomplete.