I think you raised a good question. Well, here is your answer, it tells you why the bean is simply removed when it times out, and not just passivated. Also, that is explained in HFE.
When the stateful session bean times out (due to user inactivity), the bean still stays alive in the stateful cache on the server. The price for this abandoned bean is:
1.
Server memory is not used efficiently - the abandoned bean stays in memory until it is passivated. As the client that created the bean no longer exists, the bean occupies memory unnecessarily. If your stateful
EJB is clustered, not calling remove keeps the bean in the cache of the primary server and its replicated counterpart on the secondary server. In addition to the beans, the replication machinery on both the servers also occupies memory.
2.
Performance drops - the abandoned bean will be removed from the memory by passivating it to the disk. This affects performance as passivation is an expensive operation that involves serializing the bean to the disk.