What I Learned Today
How to increase Tomcat heap size

To adjust the tomcat heap size, edit $CATALINAHOME/bin/catalina.sh and add this line near the top:

export CATALINA_OPTS=”-Xms512m -Xmx512m”

then restart tomcat.  You can verify that it worked by running:

ps -ef | grep java

and looking for the -Xms line in the output