Archival and Deletion

Just to elaborate a little further...when a Process instances is completed (all active threads have come to an end) the instance will continue to reside in the Application Server's RAM until the Data Management policy in place for that process model is enacted. You have two choices - to Delete (which means the completed instance is gone forever!) or to Archive (which means it's still removed from RAM but is stored onto disk from which it can be recovered if necessary)

The key objective here is to remove the process instance from RAM as there is a limited amount of this resource and it should be managed accordingly. Completed instances of processes aren't really that interesting (all of the excitement is usually around instances that have NOT completed e.g. in an exception state) but these will be retained in memory until the issue has been resolved. If you want information about completed instances you can write audit-like data to a database table and then safely delete the corresponding instance.