Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

how can a running servlet indicate that it wants to be shutdown?
(it has encountered some condition that it knows is bad/unrecoverable, and wants to shutdown so it can be restarted later)

destroy() is supposed to be called by the container, so that doesn't quite make sense as the right thing for a servlet to do (call it's own destroy() method, since presumably the container doesn't know that it happened in that case..)

calling System.exit() is bad for all the obvious reasons, and unfriendly as well.
is there another way?