Starting Tomcat at boot
 

I added the following line into /etc/inittab on AIX 6.1:

but the next time the VM rebooted I got an error saying it had respawned too many times. It looks like it had kept respawning and eventually used up all the memory on the box as when I tried to edit inittab in vi it eventually failed on a fork process because of insufficient memory!

What's wrong with the line above? What's a safe way to start Tomcat with the box?

I suspect the problem is your java starts as a background process and the shell exits. Then init thinks it's time to do it again. Maybe ending the script with a "wait" command would solve it (don't have AIX to hand to suggest more exactly).