I have two tomcat instances installed (different port: 8181 & 8282). If running a single tomcat instance, there is no problem but with two, one always crashed the other. Although i had these two tomcat in different directories and also added these two tomcat servers in intellij, after i run $ ps -ef | grep catalina, i realized that intellij use the same catalina.base for all tomcat instances. And i think that is the cause of the problem, see below:
501 22155 18214 0 0:02.68 ?? 0:45.83 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/Users/x/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea10/tomcat/Unnamed_tp69894d17/conf/logging.properties -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8181/endorsed -classpath /Users/x/Software/tomcat-8181/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/Users/x/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea10/tomcat/Unnamed_tp69894d17 -Dcatalina.home=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8181 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8181/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
501 22235 18214 0 0:01.20 ?? 0:19.83 /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home/bin/java -Djava.util.logging.config.file=/Users/x/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea10/tomcat/Unnamed_tp69894d17/conf/logging.properties -Djava.util.logging.manager=org.apache.juli.ClassLoaderLogManager -Djava.endorsed.dirs=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8282/endorsed -classpath /Users/x/Software/tomcat-8282/bin/bootstrap.jar -Dcatalina.base=/Users/x/Library/Caches/IntelliJIdea10/tomcat/Unnamed_tp69894d17 -Dcatalina.home=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8282 -Djava.io.tmpdir=/Users/x/Software/tomcat-8282/temp org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap start
env: mac snow leopard, jdk 6, tomcat 6.0.32, intellij idea 10.0.2