Hi, I'm Nicholas, the lead developer and a Mac user myself (I actually use all three major desktop OS regularly as I want to experience what our users experience – that helps with improving the software in ways that are otherwise not obvious to a developer living in his own bubble).
I've been having the same issue only with MAMP Pro 5.1 on macOS. I've not tried the free MAMP but considering that MAMP Pro is simply a
configuration extension to MAMP what I've found applies to free MAMP as well. Notably, I've even been having that when I'm using the phpMyAdmin version supplied with MAMP Pro or Sequel Pro which is recommended my MAMP Pro. That told me it's not an issue with our software but with MAMP itself.
Last week I've spent a day debugging this and the problem is with MAMP Pro. For some reason their MySQL server crashes when you are trying to write a lot of data on it. I confirmed it by checking the process list in Activity Monitor. When I was getting the error that MySQL has gone away I could see that mysqld (the MySQL server process) had crashed.
I've tried to get help from MAMP but I didn't get a satisfactory reply. I was basically told that they will upgrade MySQL in the next version of MAMP which obviously helps me not.
The only thing you can do is either downgrade to MAMP 5.0 which did not have this problem or use a different prepackaged local server or, if you're crazy like me, build your own local server. From what I've seen MAMP is on a constant path of deterioration and their non-support adds insult to injury.
Having talked to other people who build sites in WordCamps they seem to favor two solutions built on top of virtualisation:
I've used the first one and it's fairly simple to set up. You can use
CyberDuck to connect to it through SFTP to upload / browse / manage the files of your local server. Their deployment option is not as versatile as Akeeba Backup and their PHP versions are quite stale but it's currently a viable alternative to MAMP. Also, it's free.
The second option is much harder to set up as it requires use of command line and installing third party software yourself. If you are not comfortable with the command line forget I even mentioned it.
Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Director
🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!