It woudl be helpfull not to focus on ECM as solution but as SAS_BI as seen by those requiements http://support.sas.com/documentation/installcenter/en/ikcasemgmtofrsr/65196/HTML/default/index.html.
By that you are in a more common platform usage. Mentioing sas 9.2 as base your on that road.
As you are only having web-clients and a midtier and mentioning ghostprocesses you are likely on a Unix system (just guessing).
Ghostprocesses can be cleaned up by killing those or restarting services. Normally there is NI need to restart the whole machine.
By ghostprocesses I am understanding run-away processes on the OS that where started on behalf on user (user personal key WS).
When using shared accounts by ease of installation or as intended by isolated functionality (SP PWS OLAP) There is a difficulty to pinpoint those. Using a SP service is sharing that between users. One faulty userproces can block the next one causing a hangup.
http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bisag/68240/HTML/default/viewer.htm#n0mb6964vbfoeqn1hahr...
Timeouts with session can become nausty as almost enverywhere somebody is implementing a timer to break something with unpredcitable results (browser router firewall server). This is continously changed and adjusted. http://support.sas.com/documentation/cdl/en/bimtag/68217/HTML/default/viewer.htm#p0n3toyj2v9j4tn0z4y...
---->-- ja karman --<-----