To stop the tomcat for making a big catalina.out file, use logrotate to rotate the logfiles as needed
For most Linux distro's:
/etc/logrotate.d/jira
/opt/jira/logs/catalina.out { daily rotate 7 compress copytruncate delaycompress missingok size 10M notifempty }
This rotates the logfile daily, and keeps 7 copies. Refer to http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/logrotate8.html