Some days it's obvious I've been out of school too long.  The signals refered to in my previous post are things like SIGINT and SIGTERM - messages from the operating system that you are about to get killed by a ctrl-C.  There are plenty of others as well, but I have no idea what they mean.

http://www.javaspecialists.co.za/archive/Issue043.html
"As far as I know, the -Xrs option is there to make it easier to write services in Java"

oh word?  In any case, reading the above webpage will quickly show you how to catch ctrl-C and ignore it, OR run your clean up code and exit.

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/library/i-signalhandling/
"any application signal handler will slow the JVM."

I suppose by shutting off the signals, you get the rumored performance increase