java and debian tomcat crash

[Fabian Lienert <lienert@mitlinks.ch>]

dear list members,

we are about to go life with an opencms (cms written in java) project
running on an debian drbd heartbeat cluster with:

Opencms 5.0.0
Tomcat 4.1.24
mysql 4.0.13-2 from deb packet
apache 1.3.27.1-2 from deb packet

the problem is the following:
standalone or with apache/mod_jk heavy load or editing in opencms admin tool
tomcat crashes randomly.

you can see the discussion with opencms developer here:
http://mail.opencms.org/pipermail/opencms-dev/2003q3/006838.html

i am using debian stable, but some packages are from unstable like php4.
gcc is 2.95.4.
i tested several java packages:
-tomcat with j2sdk1.4 1 from java.sun.com creates a lot of process and open files and 
tomcat crashes randomly even with unlimited open files and process settings.
-tomcat with blackdowns j2sdk1.4 1.4.0.99beta-1 debian packet does crash.
-another test was with j2sdk-1.4.1-01-linux-i586-gcc2.95.bin i ensured that blackdown java 
is compiled for debian stable that means for gcc 2.95.4. with this configuration tomcat 
crashes too after a few requests.

-with IBMJava2-141 it is running more stable, has a reasonable number of process but 
crashes too in a httperf test over night.

is there any conflict between debian stable an java?
does anybody have similar running configuration with tomcat on debian?

thanks for any pointer!