ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server at 'sending authentication information', system error: 32

[Mic Mok]

Hi,

I am having sporadic connection failures when trying to connect locally to the server.
The failure message returns in 4+ seconds, of which no CPU time is used (sounds like a timeout to me...)
The server is configured with skip-networking, so there is no connectivity issue.
There are enough "free" connections.

Any idea what can that be?

#
# time test
#
$time mysql -u *** -p*** -D *** -e "select count(*) from ***;"
ERROR 2013 (HY000): Lost connection to MySQL server at 'sending authentication information', system error: 32

real 0m4.148s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.002s

#
# Test connections
#
mysql> show processlist;
+-------+-----+-----------+-----+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id | User| Host | db | Command | Time | State | Info |
+-------+-----+-----------+-----+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| 47716 | *** | localhost | *** | Query | 0 | NULL | show processlist |
| 47722 | *** | localhost | *** | Sleep | 0 | | NULL |
+-------+-----+-----------+-----+---------+------+-------+------------------+
mysql> show variables like "%connection%";
+--------------------------+-------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+-------------------+
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| collation_connection | latin1_swedish_ci |
| max_connections | 500 |
| max_user_connections | 0 |
+--------------------------+-------------------+