There's an annoying problem with the default Bitnami stack and Redmine on Windows: After several hours of inactivity the database connection times-out, resulting in proxy and other errors when folks try to access the service. Redmine will re-establish the connection in less than 10 seconds after you request a page, but it's still annoying and it just doesn't look good.
When I last investigated the issue I read about a lot of folks manually patching various parts of the DB connector software. As usual, all the reports were written for folks who are intimately familiar with the entire toolchain used to create the app, i.e. not me, so I sucked it up for quite a few months.
Lately I had a chance to expose Redmine to a new audience but detested the impression that this DB connection issue would have. I did another twirl through the 'nets to see if anyone had discovered a simple fix. Lo and behold, someone going by "craiger" over at the Bitnami forums figured it out, and I'll be darned if it didn't turn out to be a simple fix:
Add a new line in the “production” section of $[installdir]/apps/redmine/config/database.yml that says "reconnect: true", save your changes and then restart the application
Glory be, it works!