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Wow... 15MB? That's crazy.

It looks to me like your host is not allowing calls to MySQL using the full MySQL php library - or - your database really is getting lost. Let me give you some background...

We have seen one or two users - usually on lower end hosting options - who experienced repeated 'Server gone away' errors because their mySQL settings were not reliable. The trouble with this is that the 'gone away' error would itself then spawn an error which would trigger another 'gone away' error which would spawn another... well you get the idea.

Adding the mysql_ping() check first, while not solving their underlying unstable server issue, did prevent the cascade of error log entries. The function mysql_ping() really speaks for itself. It simply checks that the mySQL server is still there at the end of the connection.

Now - this is the first report we have had that mysql_ping() itself is causing an issue. My worry would be that if it were removed it might simply be masking a 'server gone away' issue that will still generate lots of error log entries as you would expect when no queries can be run.

I think the first thing to do would be, obviously, to remove the file daily until the issue is sorted. Meanwhile ask your hosting support why mysql_ping() calls are failing. And perhaps if all else fails preface each call with an @ character to prevent it returning an error - but that just masks whatever the problem is.

As to the notices - 'user_login' is the WordPress column name of your users user_name and as such has to be defined. I would suspect that this is tied in with the database failing which really needs to be sorted first.

Well please do let us know if all goes well and things calm down.

I would have expected that if it failed to open wp-load.php then nothing would work as that is pretty important. So... does the file exist at that location? It should do...