MySQL woes

My websites were running slowly. It just kept saying “transferring”. I tried everything with regard to apache and the network. But as it turns out, it was the MySQL database. I noticed some errors in the MySQL log “Got timeout reading communication packets” so, of course, I googled it and changed a value in /etc/mysql/my.cnf from max_allowed_packet = 16M to 256M. That seemed to fix the issue.