During regular usage Puppet looks up values from Facter. In particular to create a node's catalog Puppet asks Facter for fqdn and ip information.
The server team would prefer to determine those values at start up and then feed them into Puppet when we initialize it, rather than every JRuby instance having to call Facter's JNI to retrieve them.
It would also be good if puppetserver applied a settings catalog once (at startup), but not when initializing each JRuby instance, so that puppet doesn't try to load user/group/file providers and trigger more fact loading.