I have encountered this a number of times and I’ve normally found the answer to be a very low default setting of max_allowed_packet.
Raising it in /etc/my.cnf (under [mysqld]) to 8 or 16M usually fixes it. (The default in MySql 5.7 is 4194304, which is 4MB.)
[mysqld]
max_allowed_packet=16M
Note: Just create the line if it does not exist
Note: This can be set on your server as it’s running.
Note: On Windows you may need to save your my.ini or my.cnf file with ANSI not UTF-8 encoding.
Use set global max_allowed_packet=104857600. This sets it to 100MB.