MySQL replication is a core process for maintaining multiple copies of data – and replication is a very important aspect in database administration. In order to synchronize data between master and slaves you need to make sure that data transfers smoothly, and to do so you need to act promptly regarding replication errors to continue data synchronization. Here on the Percona Support team, we often help customers with replication broken-related issues. In this post I’ll highlight the top most critical replication error code 1236 along with the causes and cure. MySQL replication error “Got fatal error 1236” can be triggered by multiple reasons and I will try to cover all of them.

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The combination of max_allowed_packet variable and replication in MySQL is a common source of headaches. In a nutshell, max_allowed_packet is the maximum size of a MySQL network protocol packet that the server can create or read. It has a default value of 1MB (<= 5.6.5) or 4MB (>= 5.6.6) and a maximum size of 1GB. This adds some constraints in our replication environment:

• The master server shouldn’t write events to the binary log larger than max_allowed_packet

• All the slaves in the replication chain should have the same max_allowed_packet as the master server

Sometimes, even following those two basic rules we can have problems.

For example, there are situations (also called bugs) where the master writes more data than the max_allowed_packet …

Back in November, I filed MySQL bug 67448, talking about a different type of max_allowed_packet problem.

See, an application had put data into the database, but could not retrieve it without getting max_allowed_packet. With the help of some really smart community folks (named Jesper Hansen, Brandon Johnson and Shane Bester), we determined that MySQL actually has 2 different max_allowed_packet settings: client and server.

When you change the max_allowed_packet variable, you are changing the server variable if it is in [mysqld] and the client variable if it is in [client] or [mysql] or whatever client you have. As far as we can tell, there’s no way to actually view what the client variable is, as looking at both the session and global max_allowed_packet variable shows you the server variable.

If max_allowed_packet is not set by the client, it defaults to …