mysql and leechprotect question

Hi,

I lease a VPS from godaddy running cPanel/WHM 58.0 (build 28) on CentOS 6.8.

System Info:

Code:

/etc/redhat-release:CentOS release 6.8 (Final)
/usr/local/cpanel/version:11.58.0.28
/var/cpanel/envtype:virtuozzo
CPANEL=release
Server version: Apache/2.4.18 (Unix)
Server built:   Jul  8 2016 07:57:54
Cpanel::Easy::Apache v3.34.1 rev9999
PHP 5.6.23 (cli) (built: Jul  8 2016 08:02:45)
Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
    with Zend Guard Loader v3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2014, by Zend Technologies
    with Suhosin v0.9.38, Copyright (c) 2007-2015, by SektionEins GmbH
mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.50, for Linux (x86_64) using readline 5.1

Since July or so, every once in a while, I'll come in to find that none of my database enabled sites can communicate with their databases. As I prefer CLI for most trivial tasks, I used to shell in, issue

Code:

service mysql restart

and the mysql server would restart, but the problem still persists. When I restart the MySql service from within WHM, the problem goes away but I see this on screen:

Code:

160916  7:36:16 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events
160916  7:36:18 [Warning] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Forcing close of thread 865089  user: 'leechprotect'

a number of times. So, my questions are:

1) Why is this happening? I personally host another cPanel/WHM non-VPS server at another location and this has never happened on that server. Is leechprotect the culprit?

2) We host this server simply for our own websites and myself and one other admin have 'root'. Do I *need* leechprotect?

3) What is WHM doing differently from what I'm doing at CLI when we restart mysql?

Any insights would be tremendously appreciated.

Best,
-Ray