Cannot stop Tomcat

[MisterB]

I've been having some memory shortages on my vps and found that Tomcat is gobbling up quite a lot of my precious K's. But the weird thing is that it should not be enabled at all (not part of the package) and it is greyed out in the plesk server services page.

So as I don't need it, I think I can do away with the 27 java processes running in the background. However, if I try to stop tomcat by doing either "/etc/init.d/tomcat4 stop" or just "tomcat4 stop" I get this:

Using CATALINA_BASE:   /usr/share/tomcat4
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat4
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat4/temp
Using JAVA_HOME:       /usr/lib/jvm/java
Error occurred during initialization of VM
Could not reserve enough space for object heap

Why can' t I stop Tomcat and is there a way to do this nicely? Also, what would be the best way to prevent it from starting up again.

Memory is stretched, but should still be enough to stop it I think (why do you need memory for that anyway). Current mem status is:

free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3533       3450         82          0        125       1354
-/+ buffers/cache:       1970       1562
Swap:         3498       2355       1142

Any help much appreciated.

 

[MisterB]

Well, for now I just did a "killall java" (checked that there were only tomcat java processes running) and removed the file "/var/lock/subsys/tomcat4". That should do it for now, but I'm still interested in why I couldn't stop it and how to prevent it from starting again (or I'll end up with a cronjob killing java processes).