Thredds out of memory

Hi guys,

I am looking at serving some very large files through thredds. I had 
found through trial-and-error that on one particular server, somewhere 
between 60Mb and 300Mb thredds stopped being able to start serving up 
files before the client timed out.

Unfortunately, this machine services a number of people so I had to do 
my testing elsewhere. I have a 579Mb NetCDF file on my desktop machine, 
and tried doing a local test with this, installing my file server and 
the thredds server on it. What I found was that the thredds server was 
running out of heap space. Now, I know I can alter the amount of heap 
space the JVM has available somehow, and that's what I'll try next, but 
I don't know whether that's a reliable solution. I don't really know how 
much memory thredds needs on top of the size of the file it's trying to 
serve, and of course multiple incoming requests might also affect this - 
I don't know how tomcat deals with that kind of thing in terms of 
creating new JVM instances etc.

Here is the error from catalina.out:

DODServlet ERROR (anyExceptionHandler): java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java 
heap space
requestState:
 dataset: 'verylarge.nc'
 suffix: 'dods'
 CE: ''
 compressOK: false
 InitParameters:
   maxAggDatasetsCached: '20'
   maxNetcdfFilesCached: '100'
   maxDODSDatasetsCached: '100'
   displayName: 'THREDDS/DODS Aggregation/NetCDF/Catalog Server'

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space


So my question is: what's the best way to make a reliable server than 
can serve these large files?

Cheers,
-Tennessee