CI_DB_driver Bug?

There definitely seems to be some sort of issue with the mysqli driver on v3. I've been using 1.x and 2.x for years on the same server and development environment. This morning, I upgraded to 3.0 RC2, and I've been getting the same intermittent messages that others are reporting: "Message: mysqli::real_connect() [mysqli.real-connect]: MySQL server has gone away". The page takes forever to load, as it's waiting for some sort of timeout. This issue happens about 30% of the page loads.
For me, I turned off compression in the db config, and I haven't seen it since.
I'm connecting to mysql server 5.0.77 and have client api library 5.0.11. Also, PHP 5.6.5.

$db[$group]['dbdriver'] = 'mysqli';
$db[$group]['dbprefix'] = '';
$db[$group]['pconnect'] = TRUE;
$db[$group]['db_debug'] = FALSE;
$db[$group]['cache_on'] = FALSE;
$db[$group]['cachedir'] = '';
$db[$group]['char_set'] = 'utf8';
$db[$group]['dbcollat'] = 'utf8_general_ci';
$db[$group]['swap_pre'] = '';
$db[$group]['autoinit'] = TRUE;
$db[$group]['encrypt'] = FALSE;
$db[$group]['compress'] = FALSE; // Setting sompress to TRUE starts the intermittent connection issues
$db[$group]['stricton'] = FALSE;
$db[$group]['failover'] = array();
$db[$group]['save_queries'] = FALSE;