It caches names from /etc/passwd and /etc/group in memory so library routines that look up username and group entries won't have to look in the disk file. It _shouldn't_ take anytime (virtually), at all, to load unless you have a very large /etc/password or /etc/group file. Doesn't sound like you would in your situation. You could try "chkconfig nscd off" (as root) to turn it off during boot and see if you notice a performance impact. I can't think of any reason why it would be as slow as you described. It's configuration file is in /etc/nscd.conf. Note that host-caching is known to be insecure is probably toggled off. I've reduced the number of threads from 6 to 4 on my system since I only have 2 processors -- there shouldn't be that much "pounding" of the nscd service on a single user system. I also reduced my "suggested-size" from 211 down to 137 since I only have about 80 entries in each of my group and passwd files. 97 might also work in my case (I note that the value of "211" is a prime number and that may be a useful property in choosing the value of the number of entries -- I don't know, but I decided to choose 137 (or 97) because they were also primes (see "factor" command line util or man page). -l Dennis J. Tuchler wrote:
<>What does the Name Service Cache Daemon do? My installation is a solo installation and one of the computers I use stops for about a minute to load that daemon. If I don't need it, what do I amend to keep that thing from loading?