So after I hit somewhere in excess of 850 COFA Student blogs on blojsom (we're well over 1000 now, be interesting to see how many of them actually start using it…), I started running into problems with the amount of memory Tomcat was using by default.
On your standard Tomcat install, you'd increase the memory settings with something like:
JAVA_OPTS="-Xms128M -Xmx512M"
to set the minimum and maximum memory footprint, and you'd do this at your 'catalina.sh' file, which on OS X Server is in /Library/Tomcat/bin/catalina.sh
The problem here is that this file isn't what is actually called when you do stuff like:
serveradmin start appserver
only if you call catalina.sh directly like:
/Library/Tomcat/bin/catalina.sh start
which means you need to faff around if you have to reboot the server.
Anyway, some digging around found this file, which is what serveradmin uses to start/stop the appserver service.
/usr/share/servermgrd/bundles/servermgr_appserver.bundle/Contents/Resources/run.sh
which essentially contains the same stuff as catalina.sh if you're just running Tomcat in standalone mode and not using JBoss at all.
This will probably get wiped out in software updates, but at least I don't have to come up with some clunky startup item which stops the appserver service and starts it again via catalina.sh.
Be nice if we could customize these settings somewhere without having to worry about this though.