Update On Problem
After adding some out.print's to my servlet, I got more precise information as to why this problem has been occurring.
The following error was revealed -
The last packet successfully received from the server was63030 milliseconds ago.
The last packet sent successfully to the server was 63030 milliseconds ago, which is longer
than the server configured value of 'wait_timeout'.
You should consider either expiring and/or
testing connection validity before use in your application, increasing the server configured values
for client timeouts, or using the Connector/J connection property 'autoReconnect=true' to avoid
this problem.
java.net.SocketException: Broken pipe
What fixed this issue in my case, was adding the following to the my.cnf file on my server, under [mysqld], and then having the mysql server restarted.
[mysqld]
interactive_timeout=80000
In addition, I added the following to the server.xml file under the Resource parameters for connecting to the database -
testOnBorrow=true
validationQuery=select 1
I'm so very pleased with the results, and wanted to post this update. Perhaps someone else having the same problem I did will find this information to be of help:)