I keep being automatically logged out of dotProject even though I may have the timer or something similar running.

Currently, timeouts are not actually a function of dP, but of the session management in PHP. (Actually its the session garbage collector). You need to update the php.ini session timeouts.

The values you need to play with are:

session.gc_probability
session.gc_divisor
session.gc_maxlifetime

The gc_maxlifetime determines the maximum life of a session. This value is in seconds. The other two determine the probability that the garbage collector will be run for a particular request.

These values are site-wide and determine how long the session files are retained.

We are aware that this is a less than ideal situation but it will require work to resolve it in any other way.