Bug in mysqldump?

[William Shubert]

Hi. Ever since I upgraded from 4.0.x to 4.1.7, I've had occasional errors from mysqldump. I was going to report it as a bug, but couldn't do an adequate bug database search (doens't seem have have ability to search for an exact sentence), so please somebody tell me if this is a known bug/faq/whatever.

Anyway, on to the bug. I have a largish database (millions of rows in some of the tables). I copy the whole database on occasion to run tests. To copy the database, I run:

mysqldump --quick --extended-insert --add-drop-tables --add-locks main_db | mysql test_db

I know, locking the tables and copying the files is faster - but this is fast enough and more convienient, since it can run so easily in a script while I do other work. Anyway, the bug is that ever since I upgraded to 4.1.7, once in a while I get an error like:

mysqldump: Error 2013: Lost connection to MySQL server during query when dumping table `invoices_changes` at row: 582

"invoices_changes" is larger than 582 rows, so it got cut off in the middle of the table. There are no messages in the server's error log. No hint as to what happened. Does anybody know what is going on here, or should I just report it to the bug database? Is there a way I might be able to get more information? It happens maybe 1 in 10 database copies, so it's not reliable enough for me to make it happen, but it sure is annoying.