Tech/Basics/NSCD

Name Service Cache Daemon aka NSCD

History

At one point in the history of NSCD there was a bad release that caused issues. More attention was paid to the tool and now it is almost a requirement on systems running legacy code.

Use Case

When a program makes calls to getpwnam, getpwuid, getgrnam, getgrgid, gethostbyname, and other calls caching can help. NSCD provides caching to help with this. The caching can reduce round trip costs for gethostbyname for example if a program does not use TTL or destroys threads.

Resources

• https://packages.debian.org/unstable/nscd
• https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=tree;f=nscd;hb=HEAD