Everlasting tomcat processes

[Chaber, Eric]

Dear all,

in my production system I have some processes which last very long. They
seem to never die.
I can have many processes like that are lasting 10/20 mn and using my CPU
and memory in an useless manner.
What I can see making a top command :

1216 root      10   0 14604  12M  1984 S     0.5 10.4   10:28 java

I there a parameter to set to prevent from these everlasting tomcat process
?
Can i say somewhere kill these process if they last more than 4mn for
example ?

Best regards,

Eric