Issue with cannot open connection

[Nomen Nominus]

Here is my problem. I have a very classical configuration where a webapp 

with some Hibernate code in it accesses a MySQL DB. Everything is 

installed in Tomcat 6. 
I even acquired c3p0 connection pooling with the following configuration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE hibernate-configuration PUBLIC "-//Hibernate/Hibernate Configuration 
DTD//EN"
   "http://hibernate.sourceforge.net/hibernate-configuration-3.0.dtd";>
<hibernate-configuration>

<session-factory>

    <!-- Settings for MySql DB -->

    <property 
name="hibernate.connection.driver_class">com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</property>  

    <property 
name="hibernate.connection.url">jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/myDB?autoReconnect=true</property>
         
    <property name="hibernate.connection.username">myUsername</property>

    <property name="hibernate.connection.password">myPass</property>   

    <property 
name="hibernate.connection.provider_class">org.hibernate.connection.C3P0ConnectionProvider</property>
         
    <property name="dialect">org.hibernate.dialect.MySQLDialect</property>
    <property name="hibernate.connection.pool_size">5</property>         
    <property name="show_sql">true</property>   

    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.idle_test_period">1800</property> <!-- In 
seconds -->  

    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.min_size">5</property>

    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">20</property>

    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.timeout">2400</property>         
    <property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements">50</property>
    
</session-factory>

</hibernate-configuration>

After some time, ( around 60 secs ) Hibernate complains about dropped 
connections, the 

error message looks like this :

com.mysql.jdbc.CommunicationsException : Communications link failure The 

last packet successfully received from the server was
milliseconds ago. The last packet sent successfully to the server was 0 

milliseconds ago.

java.io.EOFException : Can not read response from server. Expected to 

read 4 bytes, read 0 bytes before connection was unexpectedly lost.


Refeshing the page once or twice usually fixes the problem.


Has anyone else encountered on this issue before, and if so, please help me. 
What could be possible solution to this resolution?

Thanks in advance.