Hibernate C3p0 MySQL - Getting frequent CommunicationsException

Question

My Java App communicates to MySQL using Hibernate and C3p0 libraries. I am getting following exception almost every day.

com.mysql.jdbc.exceptions.jdbc4.CommunicationsException MESSAGE: Communications link failure

The last packet successfully received from the server was 32,088,839 milliseconds ago. The last packet sent successfully to the server was 11 milliseconds ago

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Below is the details from Hibernate.cfg.xml

<property name="hibernate.c3p0.min_size">5</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_size">20</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.timeout">10080</property>
<property name="hibernate.c3p0.max_statements">50</property>
<property name="connection.autoReconnect">true</property>
<property name="connection.autoReconnectForPools">true</property>
<property name="connection.is-connection-validation-required">true</property>

My site gets frequent hits and every one hour i am executing select statements. I am not able to understand the reason behind this.

Thanks.