After I successfully deployed the Lansdowne eXist app on Pear I had to make a minor change to controller-config.xml, after which I needed to stop and start the app. So, I attempted to do so in the Tomcat manager. Stopping the app worked, but upon pressing 'Start' Tomcat basically froze up, resulting in timeout errors for all Tomcat apps on pear.hcmc.uvic.ca:8081 . I submitted an urgent ticket and sysadmin restarted Tomcat within 20 minutes.

I've used the stop/start functionality before on pear (for Francotoile), so I'm not sure what happened here.