I was just kidding. I thought the question was rather weird in the context of modern systems (The last post confirms... freeing memory... in java....) so I gave a rather weird answer that implied a non-scalable architecture, which of course is not the case.
Of course process instances that are not used at that moment but still active are removed from memory....... jBPM scales fine.
Ok,
it's what I was looking for. Is possible to read this in the documentation so I can include it in my project documentation? Thanks to everybody! Bye