Is there a default EAP server sleep time after a period of long inactivity ?

Issue

• We are using jboss 5.1 and running 2 applications as windows services. is there a default time of inactivity that puts the services in sleep mode. is there a way to ping/poll the application after a certain amount of time to ensure it does not go into sleep mode. i am not sure that it is going into sleep mode but it seems after it sits idle for a while it is slow to respond.