In case the life advice was unhelpful, I'll try to finish Hansen's comment:

https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gnupg/Agent-Options.html says the 
--pinentry-timeout default is indefinite, but whatever front-end handles 
pinentries on your system may set a different limit. You can change the limit 
in ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf, or %appdata%\gnupg\gpg-agent.conf on Windows.

Before the timeout, I can only guess that gpg holds at least some of your 
decrypted keyring in RAM. How resilient that is against a RAM sniffer I can't 
say, but would probably depend on your OS.

I've only ever seen it store a file lock placeholders on the hard disk during 
en/decryption. So you probably don't have to worry about someone recovering an 
encrypted keyring after you shut off the computer.

I'm sure at least some of what I said is wrong as I'm working from the 
documentation and not the source.

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