We recently had an issue where status messages would ‘pile up’ and fail to clear until you logged out and back in again. We found different possible causes listed but couldn’t work out the root of it until we saw this:

https://drupal.org/node/623028

which led to this:

https://drupal.org/node/635042

Turning off the Admin Menu module wasn’t really an option right now, so I ventured onto our Media Temple DV via SSH, did a bit more googling for locations and found this:

my.cnf is located in ‘/etc’

Use VI to edit my.cnf

It probably starts off looking like this:

[mysqld]query-cache-type = 1query-cache-size = 8M

And according to the above sources, I just need to add this:

max_allowed_packet = 16M

so it looks like this:

[mysqld]

query-cache-type = 1

query-cache-size = 8M

max_allowed_packet = 16M

Then save the file and restart MySQL with this command:

/etc/init.d/mysqld restart

And after one page reload, voila - status message pileup cleared.

Nice.