Broken pipe - MySQL 5.5 and tomcat6

Hi,
in a java application with tomcat6/jdbc and mysql5.5 i am having this error:

** BEGIN NESTED EXCEPTION **
java.net.SocketException
MESSAGE: Broken pipe
STACKTRACE:
java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite0(Native Method)
at java.net.SocketOutputStream.socketWrite(SocketOutputStream.java:92)
at java.net.SocketOutputStream.write(SocketOutputStream.java:136)
at java.io.BufferedOutputStream.flushBuffer(BufferedOutputStream.java:65)
at java.io.BufferedOutputStream.flush(BufferedOutputStream.java:123)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.send(MysqlIO.java:2744)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sendCommand(MysqlIO.java:1612)
at com.mysql.jdbc.MysqlIO.sqlQueryDirect(MysqlIO.java:1723)
at com.mysql.jdbc.Connection.execSQL(Connection.java:3283)
ecc…ecc…

Restarting tomcat6 and mysql5.5 the error gone away?
I’ve googled and it seemes that tuning the wait_timeout/interactive_timeout in mysql could be a solution.
Do you have any experience with this type of error?
Any suggestion?

Thank you everyone
Alberto

Did you resolve this issue? Please provide full error report.
Also could you please provide MySQL error log?